Shotgun King: the Final Checkmate

Steam Reviews

Read all reviews on Steam

• Recommended Posted October 11, 2025 on Steam I suck at normal chess, so this game is a great escape from that fact. Don't get me wrong, I suck at this too but a bit less
• Recommended Posted October 18, 2025 on Steam My boi taking down an entire kingdom of evil with a shotgun. Are they evil? Eh thats for the historians to decide, and history is written by the victors.
• Not recommended Posted April 12, 2026 on Steam It pains me to give this a negative review. As many rougelikes do they continued to add items that bloat the pool. Now it's incredibly rare to get the cards you want and synergies are near impossible. Some cards aren't even able to appear until you have prerequisite cards, but good luck getting two prerequisite cards in a single run AND for the advanced card to appear. There is a starting gun that gives you one re-roll once per choice. But that's a band-aid fix and is a bad addition since it makes that single gun the only one worth using, double so if you are trying to unlock cards for your codex or trying to get the hyper specific card combos for achievements. There was a feature where middle mouse would show you which tiles would put you into check, but this feature was removed. It was was very useful for when the board became too much of a cluster and one silly mistake could cost me hours of my time, and I know others who aren't able to fully engage with the game without the feature. Worst of all, they changed the text in the tutorial where the Black King mocks the knights. The text used to call the knights "Horse-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥" but now it calls them "Horse-Smoochers". This censorship is both disgusting and cowardly. This used to be one of my favorite games, and it is now a shell of what it used to be.
• Recommended Posted March 18, 2026 on Steam really enjoyable game, one of the few games i replay every now and then and still have a solid opinion about it (even through the losses i make, and the games i couldn't win, i enjoyed the good side of it) though i will say my arrogance is the killer of my runs because i barely think twice before i move, mostly due to me not being an experienced chess person. that aside, i loved this game, i hope more content is dropped
• Not recommended Posted April 24, 2026 on Steam My main complaint is now that they removed accessibility features in the latest update for the sake of making it harder. You used to be able to press middle mouse to highlight dangerous tiles, which allowed you to play the game with a certain level of speed. Without this, certain speedrun achievements are outright impossible, and general gameplay is now slowed down to a boring slog. This compounds with my other issues with the game, which mostly has to do with artificial difficulty. The game is unbalanced, especially at higher ranks, which is fine in other games (it's meant to be a challenge), but in this game you have next to no control over your runs (no banishing cards feature, you only pick between 2 options, rerolls are exceedingly rare). The game has also been rebalanced over multiple updates to be made harder and less fun multiple times. On top of that, 100%ing this game is a chore. There are 100+ achievements, most of which require no skill, just absurdly specific luck (a lot of achievements are "beat the game with these 3 cards", and again, you have next to no control of your cards). The game stops being fun once you go beyond your first few runs, and now that the danger highlighting feature has been removed, it isn't even fun to start with. There are mods that fix some of the problems listed, but all mods, no matter how small, disable all achievements. Oh, and they STILL haven't introduced a quality of life feature for dealing with discovered check. Like, not even a card upgrade that helps with it.
• Recommended Posted March 24, 2026 on Steam Really good game, you'd think that this would be way easier than regular chess when you have a shotgun but if you keep advancing through the throne mode ranks then you're gonna see how this is harder and you have to actually try to outsmart a smart chess bot who has every piece while you only have a king with a shotgun People say that the gameplay loop is repetitive and while that's true it's at least way more fun than regular chess because every run is different with the cards you pick, and while some people may hate struggling against the final rank on throne mode as a replay thing but I personally find it fun because most of the losses feel like I deserved it and I enjoy trying to outsmart the pieces over and over And if you don't like throne mode there's endless mode and then chase mode, chase mode changes the game a lot but not too much so that's also pretty fun