Urja

No te dice que hacer

Solo mueres y mueres y sigues sin saber que hacer

After struggling to understand what you had to do in this game (and strategy thereof) for 40 minutes, I can safely not recommend it.

I still kinda had fun ! It feels rewarding to take down a piece and absorb its power. However, the game is plagued by the abysmal quality of the IA. Even though they're of different colors, the different pieces constantly gang up together in a beautiful effort to end discrimination, at the expense of any hope you could have to end the game. You can try to lure enemies by crying for help, but these kind souls will always come grouped to see if you're okay, so that's ruined.

Weirdly enough, they picked a team game (as in chess) to portray a death-match type game, but oh well...

It's FPS chess. The idea is the pawns are the weakest links, moving up to the kings which are the strongest. You want to move around and suck life from other pieces, then shoot that at the other pieces to knock them out. You start out as a pawn and are trying to eventually become a king, to be the last one standing. Sounds cool right? Except it's not, and it's really, really, really hard. Oh and it's $10 bucks. No thanks.

doesn't worth the price (no story and game play is hard and bullshit) , maybe in a bundle or 90% OFF

too difficult and gets dull extiemly fast.
take this word from a wise fox: dont buy this game. why? several reasons:
-the Ai is too difficult, the reason to that is the game is so simple and all the enemys are bent to get you. i had instences were i was killed for doing noting but follow. an when ever you try to attack a higher rank enemy ALL OF THEM INSTENTLY are there, even on trainer mode its not easy!
-the recovery rate for the enemy is too fast! hit your target and stuned him? should be a shame if he gets up a second after to reap your life force!
-limmited map viriety, they look good but no amount will make the game more interesting game play wise insteead of just "looks smooth"

TLDR: i got this game for a 75% cupon discount and i am still regreting this desition

helpfull advise from your local fire fox

It's cool, fun and it can be both easy and hard depending on how you play it. You start as a lowly pawn. Be aggressive and try to take down the bigger pieces and the AI will come after you. Stay out of their way and just pick-up energy orbs and they will leave you alone but the objective is to become biggest badass piece and that's the king. Eventually you have to attack, starting with the next higher rank until you manage to possess the king.

Simple concepts and simple gameplay but hard to master. I got lucky once, a bishop's lifeless carcass was just laying on the ground so i possessed it but that's only how far i got. The bigger pieces normally don't attack each other so hoping for another easy taking is fat chance. However as a bishop you can revive a pawn which can spice things up and create chaos on the battle arena since the pawn's objective is to take over the bigger chess piece.

So basically you start outside a circle of battle arenas and you can choose which arena to enter. They are all interesting level design with a dominant colour theme. At first i thought a monochromatic scene is boring, actually it helps keep your focus on the chess pieces rather than distract you with different colours and textures.

It's actually a fun take on some of the esoteric meaning of life in a metaphorical way. You as a pawn or any other chess piece need energy to survive and attack others. So you consume the life of a bigger chess piece in order to inhabit them and become them. It's a bit dark take on life but similar in some ways. IRL we consume dead carcasses in order to keep our own functioning normally but we are not energy vampires, we are chemical consumers. We eat other beings, usually when they are dead but some tribes eat stuff which are alive. So the objective is to evolve into a better being. The difference is, in life we can do it without killing and becoming the being that we killed but we do still have to consume a dead being. Kinda makes life look like a sick joke when you think of it this way; one has to die in order for another to live. Anyway enough digression.

So this game is metaphorical take on the meaning of life and the evolution into a superior being. Luckily it's only a game and we don't survive by consuming each other so you can rest easy and have fun with it without the gore and bloodshed - of slaughtering lesser lives.

8/10 for the fun factor and low on system requirements.

Update 1
Correction: not the biggest piece; the last one standing. And it's not easy at medium difficulty, it's hard. The AI will mob you down if you attack a bigger piece within their line of sight. So forget about stepping-up to bigger chess pieces, it's only a strategy to the ultimate objective of being the only survivor.

4/10 on rather unfair AI tactics so overall score about average 6/10.
end of update

Update 2 - Passive Strategy
The orbs collected serves as battery energy that gets depleted over time, much like food. So you'll die if you don't actively seek out free energy balls or drain it from higher ranking chess pieces but combative behaviour can get you killed fast.
end of update

It's just not worth any money at all until it is balanced, but it probably never will be, because people have been complaining about how overly difficult it is for months/years and it hasn't gotten better by the time I finally bit the bullet and bought it. I thought I could "be good enough" to find the value in the game that other negative reviewers couldn't, but they were right: it's just too overwhelmingly difficult. The concept is the only thing good, here, but the game itself is all-but-broken. The only way this would be worth any money is if you see some major developer updates posted after the date of this review. If not? Stop giving these people money for a game that is definitely still in beta, whether they want to see it that way or not.

Bloody on point game. Concept may seem straight forward and maybe even boring but it's the first game that I've played in a while that utilizes stealth without being a murderous savage or having every level during the night. Solid 7/10 would recommend and will play again.

I'm not sure what to make of Urja. You play as a chess piece trying to kill other chess pieces by vampire draining their life essence. You essentially use your life to summon bombs that stun the other pieces and hope to completely drain their life before they get back up. But you have to play cautiously because if other pieces see you trying to kill one of their own, they will attack you. So you almost have to be sneaky about it.

You start as a lowly pawn and if you manage to kill a better piece, you can enter their body effectively becoming stronger. The higher ranked pieces like the Queen/King move faster and can drain life very fast. The Knight, Bishop, and Rook have special abilities which you can use or can be used against you.

While the training difficulty seems reasonable, the normal game mode is extremely difficult and just seems unfair. There's about 10 or so different arenas. The goal is to kill all the other pieces in the arena.

There is no tutorial and it is not intuitive on how to play or what your objective is. It an original concept, but the gameplay is repetitous and doesn't provide any gaming longevity.

Urja is a hard game with some interesting mechanics . its not a bad game but its not worth 10$ .
Once you turn on the game you are in game there is no story and no multiplayer .
when you finaly finish a level the score board will appear,showing you how well you did and comparing it to other players.
Controls can be found on their website ,if some one is having trouble with that.
Overall i ain't feeling too bad about buying this game its fast paced fun title great for taking a 10 minute break from some stressfull deskjob or homework.

pros:original
fast paced
easy to learn hard to get good
chill music

cons:bloom effect might be too much for some players
no normal interface
AI can be annoying from time to time

An exercise in frustration. Seems like an abandoned prototype. You enter the game, you are standing in the middle of a bunch of orbs (presumably portals to the levels). One is called "finale", but there is no indication which levels are more or less difficult than the others. I figured I would work clockwise from the level to the right of "finale." Already I'm guessing. I walk through the Portal. I have read the F1 help, I know the rules of the game. I did manage to finish what (I'm only guessing) is the first level on Normal, ranking 10th all-time on the leaderboard, but only because of luck (I never took the king, or the queen - I assume they got blown off the floating gameboard by the random explosions that happen everywhere - a strange mechanic) but the second level (I think?) is impossible. It is a wide open platform, basically, and whenever you attack your target piece the 'fun police' (all chess pieces of higher ranking than you) attack you immediately when you begin charging your attack. You do not even have a chance to release the shot before you are taken out. It seems like there is no way to win except for completely blind luck. I enjoy the concept of this game, but the AI is unforgiving and omniscient. It needed a lot more time in the oven. I bought this game for $1 and it may be worth that, barely. For the regular asking price of $10 this is an absolute DO NOT BUY.

Pretty original artsy singleplayer arena FPS / stealth, however obscure / hardcore / not really superb it may look.
The main problem I have is that it's very untrue to its premise regarding chess. In a misleading way. Not a single element, not a single mechanic of chess is being used or referenced here, not even remotely. Except for piece ranks - or actually names - but even this doesn't make any sense, as chess pieces don't follow any linear order, frankly speaking :). In a word, you could replace chess pieces with 1..6 numbers or (better) military ranks (cf. Stratego) and the game would be exactly the same. So tags "strategy" and "chess" are basically wrong. Beware.

Don't let my low playtime fool you: that's all it took to realize how terrible this game is. Honestly.

I like the idea, in theory. Chess pieces fighting against each other in a FPS-style is a great idea, and it could have been incredibly fun. But no. There's no tutorial to tell you any idea of what you should do, just a little question mark on the main screen that you might pass over if you're not paying attention (which I did). Once you realize the game isn't going to tell you what to do, and find your way back to the main screen and click that question mark, it basically just tells you "you're supposed to shoot the other pieces and steal their energy, good luck!"

So now you know what to do. You go back to the game, shoot an enemy... and are immediately swarmed by every other piece in the surrounding area. It's uncanny how the other pieces are able to find you, they just sort of appear even when you didn't see any around. And unfortunately the AI has perfect aim, so you're dead within a few seconds.

So you decide to try again, because you paid real money for this game, God damn it, and you're gonna get every penny's worth out of it if it's the last thing you do. And you die again. And again. And again. Then you get lucky and capture the Queen, so now you're the big dog with all the power, right? Wrong, enemies still kill you in just a couple of seconds, and you're no more effective at taking them out than you were as a pawn.

The AI is ridiculously hard, they're all perfect shots and can drain your life in just a few seconds, while your own aim is extremely difficult because not only are you forced to aim for just a small ball at the base of the other pieces, because body shots are too mainstream and only shots to the energy ball count, but even if you somehow manage to drain a bit of energy from an enemy, that damn energy ball gets smaller and smaller which makes it nearly impossible to hit. If you're able to stun an enemy, it will spend 90% of it's (incredibly short) stunned time in midair or rolling along, where the body gets in the way of your aim at that damn energy ball. The levels are way too big for a game like this, and I found myself spending most of the time just wandering the level trying to find another piece somewhere.

Once you finally sap all the energy from another piece, you can capture it. That should mean it's out of commission, right? Wrong. The enemy bishop will revive it. So you have to take out the enemy bishop too, or else you're facing an endless horde of enemies that can kill you super fast.

In case you couldn't tell by now, I'm super frustrated with this POS game. This is one instance where it's true that the only way to win is to just not play.

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It's a first person shooter where you're a chess piece. You start out as a pawn and can take over knights, bishops, rooks, the queen, and the king. Taking over the king wins the level.

There's a catch - if you attack a higher piece than you, all other AIs attack you, unless you can take over the piece's body. So it's like a stealth game where you try to assasinate a chess piece in a first person shooter.

Really challenging.

This game has a cool concept. The idea is that you play chess as a FPS and work your way through the pieces until you have conquered the king.
The execution is terrible.

The AI don't attack each other and the second you attack one of them they will all attack you.
This game is extremely difficult and oftentimes left to luck as bombs randomly drop.
The response is terrible. Many times I have clicked to try to suck energy from an AI and have to wait a few seconds.

Cool concept, terrible game.

Please update.

This is legitimately the worst game I have in my Steam Library. And I'm a Humble Bundle/IndieGala/BundleStars addict, so I have hundreds of games in my library.

I actually feel defrauded of the money I spent on this game based on the top-ranked "Most Helpful" Positive reviews.

A Chess-Based FPS/Puzzler? Are you kidding me?


Here's what this game actually is:

You spawn in a floaty, disembodied, frictionless, ultra-shiny world FPS map that feels more like a badly-programmed HL2:DM custom map then anything else.

You walk around to see a bunch of AI opponents, almost all of a higher level than you.

This is where the "Chess-based" element comes in. You see, there's a hierarchy of power levels of these opponents! The strongest is the King, and will instantly one-shot you if he wants to! Then there's the Queen, who will instantly one-shot you, the Bishop and Rook, who will instantly one-shot you, and the Knight, who is the second weakest after you (the Pawn), and so only might instantly one-shot you. He might actually just knock you down and keep you stun-locked until you die.

Well, there's also special abilities for a few of the units - the Rook, Knight and Bishop. For example, the AI Rook can instantly summon a floating block out of midair to deflect your fully-charged shot that you fired at him from point-blank range. Just like in Chess!

The "Puzzle" element of this game is that your goal on each FPS map is to kill and possess the bodies of each of the higher-ranked enemies than you. Unfortunately, the only attacks you have a chain-based energy leech - kind of like an inverse Medigun from TF2 - that is vastly weaker than your opponent's chain-based energy leech, and has much shorter ranger, and a floaty stun grenade projectile that shooting it takes away about half your life.

The onyl way to kill anyone is to shoot them with the grenade (of which you can only fire one before having to find a ball of energy sitting randomly on the map and draining it to recharge), and hope they lie stunned for long enough for you to drain them completely. If they get up during the draining, the fact that their energy leech is faster than yours means you'll never overtake them and you'll definitely die. The AI never misses, so your loss is guaranteed.

However, if any of the AI opponents see you attacking another AI, they'll swarm over and instantly one-shot you. I guess this is where the "Puzzle" element comes in. The "Puzzle" element apparently consists of hoping that the AI - which seems to wander around the map randomly - will wander into an isolated corner with sufficiently limited visibility that you can actual kill an opponent without being instantly one-shot.

I cannot recommend you don't buy this game enough. I'm legitimately upset at the money I spent on this, and I got it when it was 75% off. There are unironically dozens of games on Steam you can get for less than I paid for this that will offer you 15x the gameplay experience had herein. For example, you could buy Depth of Fear: Knossos, or Dark Scavenger, or Botanicula, etc. etc. etc. Chivarly is regularly on sale for less than I paid for Urja, and Chivalry is a great game that's about as much based on Chess as this is. (It has Knights and Kings!)

If I can dissuade even a single reader of this review from purchasing this game, my work here will be complete.

I'd say this was more of a proof-of-concept than a game, except that the concept doesn't work either.

Outside of the minimalistic appearance, there's nothing related to chess here. First off, the game is a FFA. There are no teams. Or, if there are teams, you're not on either side. Pieces don't move like chess pieces. The only thing that makes them different from one another is a single power that they use. The knight makes a shield, the rook makes a block of cover, and the bishop revives peices. Best part? You have no allies, so basically when you use the bishop's power, the piece you revived just comes to life and attacks you. Wow...

There's no campaign. The tutorial is a single page of text. There's no multiplayer. The only mode is multiplayer deathmatch with bots. I only played the game for 15 minutes, and I pretty much saw everything. I checked. There are more maps, but that's it.

At $2.50, this was a complete ripoff. If you have any lingering desire to try it just watch a single gameplay video on youtube to thoroughly kill any curiosity you may have had.

I wanted to like this game, but it's too absurdly difficult to even play.
The enemies can drain your energy in about 1 second flat and have perfect accuracy. Your stun blast knocks them over in such a way that success is entirely down to if they happen to land with their weak spot facing you.
If I wanted to play a game entirely based on luck with no real chance of winning I'd be into online casinos

Being a chess fan, I really like the idea behind this game and its mechanics. It is a wonderfully innovative take on the FPS genre. In addition, I quite like the sparse graphics and sound -- while many might consider them lame, I consider them to be sleek and clean, not unlike chess itself.

However, it is terribly, WILDY under/over tuned. That is to say: whereas you have to work hard not to win in training mode (making it ideal for learning the controls and aiming), "normal" mode is ridiculously difficult. There are three reasons for the insane difficulty:

1) The other entities rarely attack each other. But if YOU attack an entity, typically expending energy in the process, any nearby entities target you in your weakened state, even if you didn't hit the opportunistic entity with splash damage!
2) Even if you manage to engage an entity in complete isolation, it recovers from being stunned very quickly.
3) Other entities do not have any problems instantaneously targeting your energy globe when you are stunned. But even if you manage to try to start draining a stunned entity before 1) or 2), it often takes time for the entity to roll such that their base and grill work are not protecting the energy globe! By then the entity has recovered (or the other entities take note) and 1-shot you.

Consider this: at the time of writing this review, the most players that had managed to beat at least one map in the entire world (according to the leaderboard) was 15. Most of the maps had the same 3-6 entries on the leaderboard.

In conclusion, I really, really want to like this game. And indeed, there is something therapeutic about just gliding around these wonderful maps picking up energy motes. I will continue to fiddle with it from time to time, simply because I paid for it. But the reality is that gliding around too afraid to do anything -- because of the near-insta-gibbing that inevitably follows -- gets old fast. Clearly it is possible to succeed; the leaderboards prove it. But I cannot recommend this game as-is, and certainly not for its price given the huge selection of entertainments available on Steam for the same or less.

One of the most anticipated games for me, one of the most disappointing...

Ridiculously difficult, making it not fun. Have not completed a single level and don't know anyone who has.

Unlike chess which is war against two factions, this is a political struggle within a kingdom. Raise yourself up against the ranks from a pawn to a king. Several intermediary characters such as the bishop and knight have special powers like a shield etc.

I understand the concept, i understand the controls, the ai in the game is ridiculously tough and there is no easy setting. The game will entertain you for a hr or so before you just give up in frustration. Bad choice Devs.

Easy to play, but hard to beat, Urja is an addictive FPS like no other.
Start a round on one of 12 maps, killing your opponents climbing your way up the heirarchal ladder as a chess piece. Sound silly? Yes. Is it silly? Yes. Is that a bad thing? Not at all.
I'll see you on the leaderboards ;)