14 DAY TRIAL // 
Battle Worlds: Kronos might just be the Panzer General substitute that many fans of turn-based strategy have been looking for, a turn-based and tactics-driven military strategy that asks the player to think ahead, plan carefully and make sure that they can deal with unexpected events.
The core of the gameplay is pretty simple to understand, but it is hard to master, a clear trait of a solid strategy-driven experience created by the team at King Art Games.
There are various types of units, including aircraft, naval vessels, traditional tanks and robotic walkers, that players have access to, each of them able to perform a number of actions per turn, depending on their class and their upgrades.
Generally one of the actions will be movement and the other will be an attack, with a third reserved for what the development teams calls a Joker, meaning a special ability, another move or another attack.
The battlefields are built out of hexes and the core tactical requirement for victory is to move as many units into firing range, grouping them together in order to get a bonus to attack, before taking out enemies one by one.
Damage deal goes down as a unit gets weaker from incoming fire and that means that generally offensive operations bear more fruit than a solid defensive effort.
The general battle system of Battle Worlds: Kronos takes a little time to become clear, but once it’s main ideas are ingrained in a player’s brain, it becomes very enjoyable, allowing for some solid tactical planning while also leaving plenty of space for surprise moves.
The learning process takes place during a single player that includes two campaigns and aims to tell a story of a planetary wall, with plenty of characters explaining the reasons for the war and the motivations of the various leaders and factions.
The only complaints I have with the gameplay mechanics is that it can take quite a long time to watch all the enemy movements (players can opt to skip them, but that can leave them with limited information) and that units can move through other friendlies, which makes little sense unless some kind of teleportation is being used.
The narrative that King Art Games creates is not impressive, but it managed to keep me interested as I learned more and solved the specific challenges posed by the single-player levels.
Once a player completes the two campaigns, they can also join skirmish matches for a clear increase in the difficulty level.
On the multiplayer front, Battle Worlds: Kronos allows gamers to create asynchronous matches, taking advantage of its turn-based nature, and after the ruthless and calculated Artificial Intelligence, I was happy to fight a human that also made mistakes and injected some unpredictability into our games.
Battle Worlds: Kronos is a top-down title where graphics quality has a limited impact on the final experience of the gamer.
The units look good and it is easy to identify them on the battlefield without using up too much time clicking around and reading statistics.
The user interface could have used a little more work and the sound is also a little unimpressive.
Battle Worlds: Kronos is a good example of what a studio with talented developers can create when backed via Kickstarter, crafting an experience that’s aimed at a clear niche of the market and playing to the strengths of the genre.
The core mechanics are well developed and the campaign showcases their quality and offers a distinct challenge for fans of turn-based battles, while the multiplayer can offer tens of hours of fun at a player’s own pace as long as he finds the right opponents.
