Strategy games have conditioned us to believe that mysterious species, superior firepower and unbreakable defences are the biggest threat to humanity’s ongoing survival. Massive Chalice baulks at the notion, instead forcing us to come to the horrible realisation that time, not aliens, is the biggest killer of all. When fighting the long war – as you’re trying to survive against an ancient enemy for 300 years – you’ll quickly discover that, while you can be the very best strategist in the world, none of that matters unless you can get your soldiers to sex you up some healthy bloodlines.
And so Massive Chalice taught games™ two very valuable lessons in just a handful of hours: 1) We know nothing about the nuances of procreation. 2) We shouldn’t be allowed to dabble with eugenics. This became especially apparent after our entire kingdom crumbled against the Cadence after just 200 years, under what can only be described as the weight of accidental incest. We believed we had unified the realm; forged strong houses and stronger bloodlines by pairing off our best warriors to sex it up, watch over the land and have kids that we could later call up to help with the war effort. We guided the rise of dynasties and, eventually, our own downfall, as we ended up with a bunch of soldiers too stupid to hold a weapon, let alone use it.
And that’s Massive Chalice for you. Double Fine has unleashed a potent combination of intense marital strategy and familiar turn-based combat. In many ways it feels like a direct descendent of X-COM: Enemy Unknown and Fire Emblem: Awakening, though it doesn’t bear either game’s polish or commitment to fostering a continuously fun experience. But as we’ve come to learn from Massive Chalice, traits and flourishes of personality diminish across bloodlines, and it’s tough to blame a child for failing to live up to its ancestors’ legacy.
Still, where were we? Oh, yeah, the incest that crumbled a 200-year war effort. It started with an accidental sibling marriage here – there are a lot of menus to sift through – though eventually we just turned a blind eye to the House of Oftbacker and its taboo antics. We needed warriors, and they were pumping them out like armour-clad bunnies. The pair passed their greatest strengths and weaknesses down onto the children; new hybrid-classes were created, strong traits were being upheld by the bloodline, and for a time it looked like The Cadence wouldn’t stand a chance. But as soon as you lose sight of the larger battle – the war of genetics – it all goes to hell. Archers were being born too nervous to fire arrows, melee warriors were too weedy to fight and the alchemists couldn’t aim an explosive flask to save their life.
Battles play out in typical X-COM fashion, though not nearly as tight or engrossing as that much loved strategy king of the last generation. As your kingdom is attacked, Massive Chalice becomes a turn-based squad-tactics game that swaps out lasers and tech for swords and shields. Every hero in battle has two action points to spend per turn, which can be used for movement, attacks or special abilities. You might only see five or six battles every hundred years, and so the difficulty curve is pretty punishing. A terrifying fog of war clouds the battlefield, and enemies won’t hesitate to pounce, punish and put an end to a long-running bloodline.
The core combat loop is fun, but limited. The six enemy types quickly become fairly predictable, and it’s as they begin to age your warriors to death or leech your XP that the frustration sets in. It also doesn’t help that the maps are huge, and you’ll waste plenty of time attempting to navigate the fogs of war before you get the opportunity to drop into battles. It bares the solid basics of X-COM, but lacks its nuance. Never did we really feel like we had the agency to plan and execute grand battle plans – this is especially grating when a battle crosses the twenty minute mark only to be swiftly brought to an end because a Cadence swooped in from nowhere and infuriatingly teleported your melee troops away, leaving the archers defenceless and bound for death. Still, as battles are so few and far between, you’ll find that you won’t get attached to soldiers like you would in X-COM.
In fact, most of your soldiers won’t actually last for more than four battles – they will simply die of old age – but you will get attached to those individual bloodlines. And you’ll quickly feel the pressure to forge fertile love connections; it isn’t entirely uncommon to find entire classes of soldier extinct within a few hours of playing the game or, if you’ve had an especially bad battle, out of soldiers all together. Bad genetic planning can crumble entire games right from the start and while it’s initially amusing to work out how you could have avoided disaster by, let’s say, opting to not pair up the archer with a drunken disposition and the weak willed melee fighter, it can be immensely tedious to reach these moments of clarity.
Massive Chalice is a fun new take on the strategy genre, but multiple playthroughs make you realise how many of the game’s winning/losing deciders are randomised from the outset. It’s a game with a huge amount of ambition, not to mention imagination, but a few unrefined core mechanics and tedious world can overshadow all of its fun. Still, if you want to see how a house born of careless incest can quickly wreck decades of dominance, you’ll want to give this a try. If only Jaime Lannister had been given an Xbox One when Winter eventually arrived, Game Of Thrones might have been a different story entirely.
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