Claws and Chaos review

I never thought of myself as somemone who likes auto-chess since I found its earliest iterations pretty unengaging outside of the concept. So many pioneers of the genre asked players to sit in matches for almost an hour in what was mostly an in-game shop. There's more to it than that, obviously, and that's exactly why I am grateful for games like Claws and Chaos that are able to build around the mechanics of an auto-chess while removing it from its sloggy, synchronous multiplayer roots.

Claws and Chaos is an auto-chess dueling game where you purchase and sell units from a randomized shop in an effort to build a fighting force that can defeat your opponents. These units are all some form of cute animal (cats, dogs, frogs, raccoons, etc.) and the synergies you can unlock from combining units of the same type correspond to their species.

Once your team is ready, you just hit the start button and watch the fight play out. There is some light positional strategy for how to place some units, but otherwise Claws and Chaos is like most other auto-chess games in that your team makeup and matchup is the primary determinant of a battle's outcome. Watching the fight--though occasionally engaging--is like seeing a math problem being solved.

This may sound confusing (or even boring) if you've never played an auto-chess game before, but Claws and Chaos makes their unit combining gameplay very intuitive thanks to how all of its bonuses embody qualities of each animal type, and by how cute and expressive all of the units and their attacks are.

Claws and Chaos offers a variety of venues for its unit-shopping gameplay, including a nice single-player campaign that can give you a lot of leeway on testing out different synergies and strategies without having to worry about skill disparity. If you just download Claws and Chaos for this campaign, it would be well worth it, but there are also asynchronous multiplayer modes to dig into if that's more your speed or just want more game to play after completing the campaign.

All of these offerings in Claws and Chaos come in a free-to-try monetization model alongside an in-app purchase of $4.99 to unlock the game's premium version. Upon doing this, there are other things you can buy, though all of that is related to currencies for unlocking cosmetic items. I'm not one of those people who don't think cosmetic items matter (they can transform your gameplay experience!), but those items are things you can earn over time and purchase using in-game currency outright without spending more money.

Claws and Chaos is a multiplatform game that ties to an online account, which makes playing it across devices really easy. That said, if you are a PC player and download the game for your phone, you may have to purchase the premium unlock to have full access to everything you may be accustomed to.

Games like Claws and Chaos make me more enthusiastic about the promise of auto-chess mechanics. When removed from their grueling, extra-competitive roots and dumped into a more visually pleasant and laid-back format, there's a lot to like.