Massuve Chalice is like a big plate of french fries. When it first arrives piping hot, it's delicious and enjoyable while you juggle the first few hot bites in your mouth but as you continue eating, it soon gets cold and you're left with a mouthful of staleness and regret as you stare at half the plate sitting there in front of you knowing that no matter how you reheat the fries, it'll never be the same.

The game plays around with some interesting concepts, but the execution ends up flat. The idea of bloodlines is interesting and how you manage heroes throughout the years but once you peel that first layer away, there's not much to it. The combat is simplistic without much depth to the strategy and soon gets dull. the characters both heroes and monsters lack variety and the story is pretty linear and bare. The game eventually ends up more of a chore and you feel it even more once you hit the halfway mark.

Buy if only heavily discounted and if you don't mind highly repetitive games, else go for the XCom series instead.

If you're like me, and you like a (relatively) easy strategy game with an engaging story and characters, this really isn't it. If you're not like me, and you're a heretofore unknown deity of strategy games, then you probably don't care what a puny mortal like me has to say anyway.

With that being said, I tend to play most strategy games on what I like to call, "lil' ♥♥♥♥♥ mode" because while I'm terrible at strategy, sometimes it's just fun to manage a group of characters. What can I say? I like playing god.

When I started the game, it hit most of my buttons. Pretty art, cool game mechanic (bloodline management), interesting premise, snarky narrators...And the combat was fun.
I even enjoyed the research, although it did get kind of boring after a while. But I was pretty attached to a couple of my bloodlines so I kept going.

Then, the Chalice started suffering from dementia, because they'd repeat themselves. Over and over and over. Apparently, the dementia was contagious, because the Cadence seemed to catch it and kept attacking the same three sectors. And the random events. My god. I was more scared of them than I was of the Cadence, because while I had a 33.3% chance of an OK outcome, the other two outcomes were invariably bad and terrible, so I actually had a 66.6% chance of one of my heros dying or getting maimed each time. Hm.

Despite the Chalice's mental health issues, I soldiered on and made it to the halfway point. I felt pretty accomplished. I'd been beating back the Cadence, my keeps were doing well, research was progressing, and then the fire nation attacked the Sagewright's guild got attacked. And what do I see when I get in there? Advanced Bulwarks. 5 of them. Surrounding my heros. Who all died. I think it only took about 6 turns.

Well ok. Maybe I deserved that after all my successes thus far. Maybe my next battle will go better.
Actually, the next battle was less "I should be careful so I don't lose any heros" and more "Jesus H. rollerblading christ i finally killed a bulwark after getting acid all over me from the rupture I missed and now there's 5 more bulwaks, 6 lapses and another rupture?!" Needless to say, it was every hero for themselves after that. Billy-bob over there who failed to hit the broadside of a bulwark when it was three squares away and dead ahead? Sorry dude. You're going to be rupture bait while the rest of my hunters nope on out with their veil armor.


TL;DR: It's pretty, bloodline management is cool, and it's really fun for the first half when you can actually kick some ♥♥♥. Said ♥♥♥-kickery makes up for the repeat dialogue, the extremely slow pace of gameplay, and the god-awful, weighted-against-you (66.6% chance that your day is about to suck, remember?) random events. In the second half of your game, when you're just throwing your heros at the Cadence meat-grinder, the previously bearable annoyances become more like unbearable, i'm-going-to-throw-something-through-the-monitor-if-I-hear-that-line-one-more-time annoyances.
Overall, I don't really recommend it, although I wish there was a "meh" button. if it's deeply discounted or part of a bundle, give it a go, but don't pay full price for it.

Massive Chalice combines recent X-Com combat with a hero breeding system. When I first read about it I was really interested and excited, but only after a few hours, I came to the conclusion, that there is no life in this game.

Let me explain that a little:

The combat: An immersive game cant be shallow. If you played the recent X-Com titles you will have noticed that they watered down the combat compared to the old titles. Massive Chalice has a watered down recent X-Com combat system. It lacks any strategy, if you ask me. There is no flanking, no useful cover system. In the end, you will only care about the swiftest way to wipe away your enemies. And when it comes to wiping out, you will mostly care for the highest damage. I don't feel any synergy between the classes.

Home/map screen: While waiting for the fast forward function to pop up any events, the game feels lifeless. Nothing will happen. Your map does not live. You wont see any changes in your nation within a hundred of years. While I do not care for graphic quality, I care for visuals. I do not like to stare at a lifeless map for a huge amount of time. This lifelessness continues:

Research/castle: You have the possibility to research new stuff. Weapons, armors, items, whatever. The visuals for that are not appealing. They are mostly symbols and text. Some areas actually show a nice background, which helps your kingdom come alive, but mostly you will look at text and symbols. Spacebase DF-9 had a similar system, which is really not appealing.

Levels: The levels are mostly tiny arenas or tunnel-like maps where you have to fight the Cadence. Combined with the shallow combat, this will rapidly feel like heavy repetition. No map is unique, nor interesting. Its always about search and destroy. In some events, you have to defend a castle and protect your breeders. There, you will fight in their castles. Man, those castles feel so dead, I would rather just jump down the castle tower. Everything is grey, lifeless, looks like a maze. Where are those libraries, dining rooms, stables, whatever? May be they are there and I just did not see them, but especially the castle maps do not look appealing. Depressing, to be honest.

Death: Permadeath is great. That makes every decision important. But with all those deaths, with all this loss, there should be a place to worship your most important resource. At a certain point, I stopped caring about what color the heroes wear, wether they are male or female, which banner they carry. At a certain point, it was all about stats. They are a resource and that made me feel pretty lonely. No bonding to any fictional character. No caring for any hero. No favorite. I know that this not really avoidable, but there should be a way to truly honor and remember my heroes. Make them come alive for the short duration they will be with you.

The Chalice, the voices: The voice acting is pretty good. I like it, but it wears off just too fast. The two talkers start to repeat themselves early and that is counter-immersive. Also: Since they are no persons, but a massive chalice, I felt pretty alone in the game. I could not bond with them, because they had no visuals I could stick to, no interaction. Nothing.

In sum, it may sound a little drastic to some, but Massive Chalice was only entertaining for a short duration of time. The rest was depressing. It felt shallow, trivial and lonely so many times in my short duration of game time. With no avatar, no continuing visible NPCs, no bonding with your brood, no life in the castle on the map, I felt like I entered a world of nothingness. Cold lonely nothingness. With two voices in my head, that kept entertaining each other like a dark circus show, somewhere in a lifeless void, doing the same old trick over and over and over again.

I am sorry, but ~20€ or whatever the price may be now is way too much money for this game. I can not recommend buying it unless you enjoy mind numbness, not caring for your party/characters, hollow design, 7 different enemies throughout the whole game and ... so ... on.

More like Massive Disappointment. This feels more like the start of an Early Access game rather than the end of it. Edited for clarification, and typos. It's not that this is a bad game per se, so much as there are better games at the same price point.

I'll keep this short. I typically play on easy for those of you who actually care.

Pro: The Generation concept is neat.

Neutral: Apparently, if you make it past Year 150 'Advanced' enemies make the game more fun. This was not my experience, but if you like watching your heroes suffer increasingly horrible odds to placate a giant talking goblet, more power to you.

Con: Due to the gameplay, if you don't get the baby train rolling immediately, you lose. Between age, 'traits' (Infertile), and combat, time is a far greater threat than the Cadence could ever hope to be.

Con: You can breed, and you can fight. That's it. Despite the simplicity, Double Fine somehow managed to make the combat both incredibly boring and frustrating. Try not to get attached to your people.

Con: Startling lack of endgame content. You've seen everything Massive Chalice has to offer by year 150 or so. The enemies have different varitions, there are hybrid classes (which mix/combine class skills and armor appearance).

Bought this quite some time ago and patiently waited for the release. Played for 2 hours and honestly can't say i want to launch it ever again.

Outright boring and plain the game simply forces you to breed your characters and constantly fight same enemies on same maps in turn based battles. There's barely any strategy involved and the game is shallow beyond any words.

Breed, fight, build a building, wait, breed, fight, wait, breed, fight, wait, breed, fight, wait and so on and so forth. Where's the fun in that?

The story is barely covered, the characters do not have any backgrounds or personalities and they die like flies anyway. There is no fun to be had here at all.

I think the game is either unfinished and rushed just like DF9 or at least has a lot of wasted potential and bad design choices.

Maybe they should've focused on building aspect more or maybe they should've focused on characters so each one was unique and interesting. Either way - its boring and no amount of love towards Double Fine and Tim Schafer can fix that.

Also -50% in the first 3 weeks since the release is a pretty desperate move. Hopefully Double Fine can recover from DF9 and this game since apparently not enough people buy it.

A very frustrating game. A full campaign took me a little under 22 hours to finish. There's too much I can complain about, so I've reduced this review to major grievances.

Gameplay can get boring real quick. Prepare to fight in the same maps over and over again. With 3 classes (plus 6 breedable hybrids that have minor tweaks) there is not a lot of variety. I wish there was more to do in the game. I wish you could be more proactive in fighting the Cadence, in some way taking the fight to them. Staring at a timeline waiting for the Cadence to attack is a very dull experience. The random events in-between attacks do more harm than good. I constantly lost buildings, heroes, and gained negative traits. Each time the timeline stopped for a random event I dreaded it. There's practically no story, no lore. 300 years of defending against an enemy and I knew nothing about them. I was hoping that the ending would explain or at least give some insight into the Cadence, but of course it didn't. The ending is very short, vague, and feels like a cliffhanger.

Massive Chalice is a turn-based strategy game that has the player rule over a land that is under attack. The defense force consists of heroes, which battle in short, turn-based skirmishes against invading forces. Heroes live for 70 years on average, but the player has to defend the land for 300 years. Therefore the player has to marry off heroes so that they produce children, which get some of their genes and personality traits from their parents. This way, the player attempts to breed heroes of good stock, so that future generations are better able to defend the land against the invaders who get stronger all the time. Sometimes a hero may leave behind his weapon upon death, which then becomes a family relic, that gains better properties over time when it is used in combat.

While the game has some original ideas and can be fun to play, it also has some very noticable flaws. What irks me the most is the lack of control that the player has over important parts of the game. Even on "Normal" mode, the game is really hard. Being hard is not a negative by itself, but Massive Chalice is hard because of randomness that is beyond the player's range of influence.

The most prevalent example of the game's randomness are the events that occur regularly. An event is a story moment in which the player has to make one or more choices, picking from several textual options presented. Some of these choices lead to slightly beneficial results, some of them lead to very bad results. But what result you get is completely random! There is no way to influence the outcome. You pick and hope for the best. A hero gets a positive trait, or a negative one, or your best hero might die, or you might lose a relic, or you might lose part of your land to corruption (and once you go down that road, you are on the losing track).

You also have relatively little influence over what genes the heroes get. Yes, they are likely to get some genes from their parents, but these might be good or bad, and they might get new genes that their gene pool did not contain before. Since parents only get a few children, it is not uncommon for a family of good stock, which you carefully bred, weeding out all the bad offspring by sending them into battle or to the Sagewright, to get wasted in one generation because the offspring gets inferior random genes or there is no more good partner available. There is almost nothing that the player can do to protect a family against that. Basically, the only thing that may help is calling forth new heroes, which takes about 5 years of research, and produces 5 new heroes with random attributes. Usually all of them are crap -- Infertile, Sickly, Clumsy, Nervous wrecks. Again, complete randomness.

Finally, there is the issue of the combat. The enemies are relatively weak for the first half of the game, but after the halfway point they ramp up in difficulty in big strides. And then the combat rolls are really starting to get on your nerves, as a hero that gets attacked might evade the attack, or might lose one or two hitpoints, or lose all of his hitpoints in one go. There seems to be very little in between.

The game has been compared to XCOM, and it definitely has a lot of similarities. But XCOM offers the player many more ways to mitigate the random effects of the game, both in strategic decisions and tactical approach.

Making the player suffer badly from the whims of random events is a serious design flaw for any strategy game. I therefore cannot recommend Massive Chalice. I have had some fun with it, but I am always interested in seeing what Double Fine comes up with, and got the game at a big discount. It may be worth a couple of dollars or euros to you, but do not get it at full price.

A good game that stops short of being great.

Massive Chalice takes tactical turn-based games, and adds a new twist: a real sense of time. This creates some interesting strategy: keep your best warrior fighting, turn her into a regent so that her children get her warrior genes, or retire her to a Standard so that all children get the benefit of her experience? I've never had a game before where I've had to worry about where my next warriors come from when my current ones die of old age. A veteran and skilled player of many strategy games, I got my butt handed to me my first game just because it requires such a new way of thinking. Brilliant.

Then it stops. After about 100 years, it all becomes repetitive. Each generation plays the same as the last. Each choice is decided by exactly the same parameters as the one a generation before. The enemies are the exact same, just with more health and attack power (you deal more damage and have more health, so it comes out the exact same). You just do the same thing over and over again, and win. I didn't have to adapt my tactics once in the last 200 years of the game, which is a shame considering how fun the first 100 years were. And in those last 200 years, there are over 20 battles of the same thing, again and again.

I still enjoyed the last 200 years, but by the time I had beaten the game, I was done with it. Tragic, really, because the game had so much promise.

Read the other reviews for in depth content of this game, I might not get too in depth about mechanics and such, I'm just gonna blabber for a bit.

I personally enjoyed this game and have played through it multiple times. It starts out as interesting considering it's initial concept involving heroes and trying to create and maintain bloodlines with good genes that can carry on to future generations, while hoping the bad ones don't... While it's true that heroes are bound to die, whether from time or battle, and thus you can't get "too attached" to them, you still can have favorites and favorite bloodlines. I've noticed a bunch of reviews whining about not being able to keep the same hero forever, but that's what happens over 300 years. People die. I always liked the system and felt it was pretty neat that my favorite heroes can live on in their kin with their genes and house name.

Make your favorites advance in level through battle, do what it takes to keep them alive for multiple battles, then make them a regent before they're too old to make heroic babies that have potential to be your new favorite! It's not hard to understand. Hell, if they kill enough cadence and get enough xp, their weapon becomes a relic that can be passed down to others in their bloodline. Cool.

I'd recommend playing this game on easy the first time around to get the swing of things, then try it on hard (if you feel confident about things), then try it on hard with IRON mode enabled (which just means you only get one save that's overwritten after each action you take)... I also played it on Brutal difficulty with IRON mode and I guess you could do that too, I just hope you don't start out that way.

The different difficulties are there so that once you pick up on the game and figure things out, you can apply the strategies you've learned from a previous playthrough and make sure you don't repeat your mistakes, while having a greater challenge to keep things fun...

The game is replayable, at least in my opinion. The combat system isn't the most exciting, and that's what makes it tough to want to play again, so I wouldn't recommend sitting down and marathoning it as if you had to beat it as soon as possible. Just take it easy.

Think about your choices carefully and decide what would be the best course of action and things like that, and if you mess up, then load a save and learn from it (unless you're playing IRON mode, in which case try your best to not ♥♥♥♥ things up anymore). At first, I played for hours, but for my following playthroughs I played for maybe 30 minutes to an hour or two a day and got plenty of enjoyment out of it. I now currently have 100+ hours and I haven't played it in a while but I noticed it was on sale for only $7.99 right now and thought I'd write a quick review. It kinda makes me wanna play it again actually, and I think I might.

Long story short, it's a pretty good game, though not without its faults, I'll admit. I do recommend it though, especially since it's on sale for less than half price... Give it a shot.

This was my first review and I don't think I did a good job, but either way, I recommend this game.

I Kickstarted the game and I am writing this review not of the full game, but the current early access version.

And as it is now - I would not recommend anyone to get it. Yet.
The game clearly has huge potential, but overall lacks in content.
The turn based combat is rather fun. Not that many options, so sooner or later it will get repetetive, but unlockable skills help in that regard.
Outside of combat, you are managing a very small group of lands, on which you can build one building, to improve the building times, hero training or just add keeps for your existing heroes to breed. As you pass years, not turns, your heroes will drop like flies. I personally don't like how fast that happens, making one generation of heroes fight from 1 to 4 times usually.
When they die, they can leave a heirloom to improve other hero from thier house.
The game is about limited resource management (heroes) and combat proficiency (again, heroes).
Outside of that simple mechanic (to not die out...) there is nothing else to do. If you do that, your heroes will eventually level up and get stronger.
He story wouldn't exist if not for the two "voices" of the Massive Chalice, that bring some falvour to the, otherwise lifeless world.
Events (text + choices) happen, to help with that. So far, I've seen mostly negative outcomes though.

I would say the game would be quite awesome, if there was more lands available, more building types (3!?), more hero types, customization of houses and heroes... Maybe item crafting? The game is begging for those,

The game does provide a bit of fun, and while it certainly IS PLAYABLE and enjoyable (if for a short ammount of time), the potential for it is so, so much greater than what it currently is.

So, no. I do not recommend the game at this point.
Wait a little while, maybe they will improve the game in the places that it's lacking?

If the game was already finished and the price was half what it is now, I would recommend it. But there is still time to release date.