Warhammer 40,000: Regicide
The PC version, not the Android version, and not the in-universe game the name is presumably a reference to.
Regicide is an odd game. At its core, it's a chess game with a 40k aesthetic, comparable to how Battle Chess was a video game version of chess mostly distinguished by having nifty little animations. Unlike Battle Chess, Regicide also offers an alternative game mode -labeled 'Regicide', naturally- that adds additional layers of mechanics to the core chess behavior. Chiefly, the ability for pieces to take shots at each other and wear them down, instead of demanding you move a piece into another piece.
Chess+40k is a difficult combination to make work well right out the gate. The entire conceptual framework of the 40k setting vs chess' game design are badly at odds with each other; in chess, strength is defined entirely by the movement behavior and capture behavior of a piece. Faster and more mobile pieces are stronger than slower or less mobile pieces. In 40k, strength often costs speed, with the most brutal warriors of a faction tending to trudge their way toward the enemy, relying on their inherent durability to reach the enemy before they can be gunned down. It's almost unavoidable that a 40k-themed chess game would end up with incongruous imagery.
Then Regicide worsens it by using the Space Marines as its foundation. I'd have bought Guardsmen as slow, unwieldy Pawns, or Necron Warriors, or any number of other 40k factions' base grunts in the role. Tactical Space Marines being a trudging force barely able to maneuver is bizarre enough on its own, and gets worse when you contrast it with Devastators as Bishops and Terminators as Rooks end up vastly faster and more mobile, never mind that a Devastator is pretty much a Tactical Marine weighed down by heavy weaponry while a Terminator's armor is in no way designed for speed.
The insistence on an infantry-only force compounds things yet further: a vehicle filling the role of a Rook or Bishop's high speed in a straight line would be more or less intuitive. This could in turn have allowed for making the Force Commander (ie King) be equipped in Terminator armor without losing any clarity at a glance to justify their sloth on the battlefield. (I'll admit I don't have a good answer for making a satisfying Queen on the Space Marines, but I already noted they're a poor base for this in the first place)
And bizarrely, what opportunities the lore provides to smooth this over are not taken. Terminators come with teleporters in 40k lore, yet Terminators in Regicide will simply walk or perhaps run, no matter how far they have to go. 'Meganobs' on the Orks are kitted out in their own unwieldy power armor, and could've been presented as tapping into their batteries when crossing large distances quickly, or something similar. They still trudge the whole way.
Related to all this is that the game -much like Battle Chess- went through the effort of custom-defining capture animations for each interaction, and unfortunately only a handful are fairly satisfying. Terminators are one of the most egregious, as they have a prominent Power Fist you'll rarely see them use, instead opting to just shoot the target for a few seconds and then walk up to its tile. I like the animation for Assault Marines (Knight) capturing Shoota Boys. (Pawn) It's quick and it has a real sense of physics to it. There's not many I can say the same for, and some of them seem to have actual errors in them: if a Tactical Marine captures a Stormboy (Knight, again), one part of the animation involves pressing their gun into the Stormboy's chin and shooting... while a chainsaw sound plays.
Normally I'd gloss over this kind of aesthetic thing, but the game outright lets you play it in the form of classical chess, just with a 40k aesthetic. Regicide mode is not presented as a preferred or primary mode except inasmuch as the game has a campaign and it's purely in Regicide mode.
But okay, so the aesthetic/conceptual end is wonky at best, but what about the Regicide mode's gameplay? How about that...
Campaign
The campaign is... uneven.
First a bit of background: in the campaign, there's always a primary objective, a secondary objective, and a fail condition. The primary objective is what you're meant to do to complete the mission, the secondary objective is unnecessary but is usually an additional challenge and if completed gives additional Requisition (In-game currency to unlock stuff) and experience. (There's a player level mechanic. It doesn't do a lot that I can tell) The fail condition is what you can't let happen or you're going to have to restart the mission.
A large number of missions in the game have the quality of their experience hinge heavily on how much you care about that secondary objective. If you don't care, many of these missions are fairly forgiving, if perhaps a bit boring. If you do care, the difficulty often spikes substantially, and in particular in many cases the random number generator becomes your nemesis-
Excuse me, Ghoul King, did you say 'random number generator'? In relation to a chess game?
Yyyyes. Yes I did.
Yeah, Regicide mode incorporates randomness. There's less than there could be, but regular attacks default to a chance to hit. At range you'll typically have a 50-70% chance to hit, depending on what unit is firing, and in melee it tends to be more like an 80-90% chance to hit. Attacks also have a chance for a critical hit, though I've no idea what the default value is -I'd guess something like 5% or less, based on how rarely they crop up, but the game doesn't mention it anywhere or even bother to tell you that critical hits have an innate chance of occurring. Crits themselves seem to be random even beyond that; as far as I can tell, the amount of damage they add on is random to a fairly significant degree.
Thankfully, those are the only two core random elements, and only a few special abilities invoke randomness. Most of them on the Orks, presumably because it's always been a thing in the tabletop version of 40k that Orks are heavy on randomness.
Anyway, the reason the RNG often becomes your nemesis is that by far the campaign's two favorite kinds of secondary objectives are:
1: Capture, not shoot to death, some specified set of enemy pieces.
or 2: Avoid losing some specified set of your pieces.
The former in particular places you in a situation where the pieces you're trying to capture are free to shoot at you, but you shouldn't waste the Initiative Points to shoot at them since a capture is an automatic instant kill without regard to current Wounds. Functionally, you're dealing with a puzzle game set in the framework of chess rules, only the enemy is constantly rolling dice to try to take away your pieces. You may well 'solve the puzzle', only for one of your key pieces to finally collapse under gunfire and so not be credited for figuring out the solution.
However, while most missions are okay-if-maybe-boring if you don't care much about secondary objectives, there's some missions where even completing the primary objective puts you in a nightmarish chess puzzle situation where you have to figure out exactly what the game wants you to do or else you will fail, and even if you do that the RNG may screw you over anyway.
And to be honest, the game's objectives have some dubious coding and possibly some dubious decisions, though with the bugginess it's hard to tell if some of these are even deliberate. One mission wanted me to use the Librarian's (Queen's) Life Leech ability three times. I ended up doing the mission twice due to another dubious decision on the part of the game (Short version: if you decide to play offline and then make an account, everything you accomplished offline won't be ported to your multiplayer account, not even if it was freshly-made and no account has ever been associated with your offline play), with the first time going just fine but with the second case I finished off the last enemy with the third Life Leech and didn't get the credit.
On a different mission, the primary objective was to kill all my enemies, and when only 2 were left the game suddenly declared me victorious. It's not just secondary objectives that are buggy or oddly-designed, and indeed one of the more bizarre decisions of the game is that you can succeed at a mission while failing to get the Requisition and experience from the primary objective by virtue of technically not achieving it. If, for example, your primary objective is to get a unit to a particular area of the board, the game will still give you victory and allow you to progress in the campaign if you instead wipe all your enemies off the map -you just won't get the rewards.
A particularly bizarre case was of a mission where the primary objective was to kill the Warboss (King) and the secondary objective was to kill everything. I painstakingly butchered every non-Warboss enemy and then put the Warboss into checkmate. This got me victory, it credited me the secondary objective... but not the primary objective.
Utterly bizarre.
So what about the...
Narrative
The story is bland and delivers information inelegantly. You're playing as the Blood Angels, so of course their 'curse' and the Death Company come up in the plot. The campaign quite reasonably assumes not every player has any idea about what I just mentioned, but the process of getting that information to you tends to have shades of 'as you know', and generally the story is failing to move forward as this information is provided. I don't simply mean that you have to sit through a couple of minutes of exposition before the mission briefing gets back to telling a story -I mean there are entire mission briefings that are nothing but exposition, and then the mission starts without any real context.
To be fair to the game, part of the problem is the reasonable-seeming decision to make Orks the opposing force. On the level of just playing a match, with quirky Ork graphics and so on, Orks make a lot of sense. Unfortunately, they're difficult to leverage as villains for a story, and Regicide's campaign tends to cut away the plot hooks it could have given itself to work around the problem. I could compare this to Dawn of War's original campaign, which also opened up with Orks as an enemy, but which not only moved its focus elsewhere eventually but even when those elements had yet to come into play the actual story was focused on the evacuation of civilians and the like. Stuff that could be achieved, and mean something, and did not directly engage the Orks narratively, using them primarily as something for you to fight in the gameplay. Regicide instead chooses to have all the civilians dead before the Blood Angels show up, and then when the Blood Angels learn of this their reaction is some horror/anger that doesn't change anything because they were already dead-set on cleansing the Orks from the planet.
But even taking into account how hard it is to use Orks as a direct antagonist for a story, the clunky delivery of exposition hurts the game, the nearly non-existent pool of characters hurts the game (You've got the Force Commander and the Librarian for actual characters on the Blood Angels, and Gobklaw the Warboss is the only enemy character in real terms), and while it's genuinely impressive to me that the campaign has 50 missions (Just for the Blood Angels' campaign! There's also an Ork campaign you can unlock) in it there's really not enough story to spread across that.
There's so little to it, in fact, that I don't have much to say about it.
So let's get back to...
Regicide Mode
Regicide Mode is a neat idea I wish had gone a bit further.
I'd sort of figured Regicide Mode would shake up the core chess rules. Maybe Pawns would instead all have King-style movement in Regicide mode. Maybe Rooks would have a limited number of tiles they could travel at once, instead of 'infinite until they hit something'.
Or maybe there'd be more indirect changes. Space Marine Rooks are Terminators: maybe they'd be able to teleport to somewhere within 3 tiles of their current location, radically changing how one uses Rooks as the Space Marines. Or maybe their durability would be emphasized, with them being able to activate an ability to become temporarily immune to captures.
The actual gameplay is sort of... layered atop conventional chess. When your turn comes by, you take a chess move: one unit moves under chess rules, potentially capturing a single enemy. After that is done, you're in the 'Initiative phase', and are given 3 Initiative points to work with. (You can actually store up to 5 at a time, but you gain 3 per turn) A unit performing either regular attack ("Snap Shot' for ranged, 'Assault' for melee) consumes 1 Initiative Point, so you can only fire 3 times per turn, and can only fire up to 5 times in a single turn. Additionally, a given unit can only perform an attack once per turn. Special abilities can also conflict with attacking, or merely with other special abilities: a Tactical Space Marine can toss a Frag Grenade, and this not only consumes 2 Initiative Points but also prevents that particular Tactical from using Snap Shot or Assault in the turn. A Devastator can Suppress an enemy and fire in a turn, but Suppression conflicts with Going To Ground (A stock ability that makes a unit take less damage, but the benefit goes away if they move) as well as their other ability. (Which you'd expect to improve their chance to hit, but in actuality increases their ranged damage until such time as they move)
There's other stuff the game never explains itself with cooldowns. Most unit-specific abilities have a cooldown preventing them from being used too often, but some of these cooldowns actually occur across the entire unit type. (eg tossing a Frag Grenade with any Tactical means no Tactical can toss another until the cooldown has passed)
On top of all that, you get four slots for abilities not specific to any particular unit. This is actually the only part of gameplay you get to customize in multiplayer: the Space Marines and Orks each have 12 such abilities, and you can use any arranged of their four so long as there's no duplicates. You can even do without such abilities entirely! These too burn Initiative Points and have cooldowns.
The whole thing is actually kind of chess-like in its own way: most turn-based strategy games allow every unit to do stuff every turn, independent of each other. Regicide Mode is not quite as strict as regular chess, but there's still a similar principle that simply outnumbering the enemy isn't as big a deal as you might expect: you can have seven units in range to fire on an enemy, and you won't actually be able to have them all take the shot. Most of the time, only three of them will be able to fire, and not even that if you're burning Initiative Points on other stuff.
Now, while I said earlier I'd have liked the game to go further, I do think there's some nifty stuff here. The main caveat to that is that the campaign is terrible at actually illustrating the niftiness of the system: as of this writing I'm around 80% of the way through the campaign while having done exactly one skirmish, but it was the one skirmish that got me to see how the Initiative phase can do some interesting things. No campaign mission has highlighted the system's strengths, and in fact they've tended to make the system seem as unlikable as possible. Most egregious is how often the loading screen asserts that what would be sacrificial in chess can be 'the start of a heroic combination. Take risks!' I'm sorry, if you're playing the campaign, that's a lie: do not take risks, the missions are carefully designed to punish taking risks.
The skirmish showed however that you can do genuinely interesting stuff in Regicide. You can go from having no pieces threatening the enemy's King to having two such pieces doing so, simply by moving one in position while the other is in position bar a pesky enemy you shoot out of the way. You can chip away at a Pawn formation with gunfire instead of having to either make a sacrifice or work at right angles to the problem. The need to juggle both the chess end of things and the Initiative end of things also adds a kind of depth to the game, where a player might get too focused on one end and overlook the other. That's a good thing, allowing players who have very different skills to still potentially meet on something like even ground.
I do wish, however, that the game reversed the phases. The Initiative phase would dramatically change the game if it was possible to, for example, gun down the Pawn blocking your Rook from the King and instantly win as a result. Blockades would be less reliable, and the game would be less trap-centric: in regular chess much of core play involves setting up situations where you can punish a move in a way that makes it not worthwhile (eg Rook takes Pawn, and then is immediately taken by another Pawn), and Regicide Mode not only doesn't change that but in fact gives you more rope to hang yourself with. Gunning down the enemy Pawn that was preventing their Rook from taking your Queen is a mistake if you don't have a trap already in place to punish exactly that, making things worse rather than better. Just switching the phases would thus be a paradigm shift, and make it a lot more interesting to compare and contrast 'classic' (ie regular chess) with Regicide.
--------------
Overall the game isn't as great as I would've liked, with some of its most basic decisions unfortunately contributing to the problem (ie these are not the kind of thing patching would fix), and unfortunately it seems to be more-or-less unsupported -for example, there's a 'daily reward' mechanic where you gain experience faster if you log in every day, but it's permanently stuck saying the next reward is 23 hours and 59 minutes away without ever giving such a reward- but it still manages to hold my attention as something rather unique.
Much more so than I'd have expected from 'chess inspace 40k'.
Regicide is an odd game. At its core, it's a chess game with a 40k aesthetic, comparable to how Battle Chess was a video game version of chess mostly distinguished by having nifty little animations. Unlike Battle Chess, Regicide also offers an alternative game mode -labeled 'Regicide', naturally- that adds additional layers of mechanics to the core chess behavior. Chiefly, the ability for pieces to take shots at each other and wear them down, instead of demanding you move a piece into another piece.
Chess+40k is a difficult combination to make work well right out the gate. The entire conceptual framework of the 40k setting vs chess' game design are badly at odds with each other; in chess, strength is defined entirely by the movement behavior and capture behavior of a piece. Faster and more mobile pieces are stronger than slower or less mobile pieces. In 40k, strength often costs speed, with the most brutal warriors of a faction tending to trudge their way toward the enemy, relying on their inherent durability to reach the enemy before they can be gunned down. It's almost unavoidable that a 40k-themed chess game would end up with incongruous imagery.
Then Regicide worsens it by using the Space Marines as its foundation. I'd have bought Guardsmen as slow, unwieldy Pawns, or Necron Warriors, or any number of other 40k factions' base grunts in the role. Tactical Space Marines being a trudging force barely able to maneuver is bizarre enough on its own, and gets worse when you contrast it with Devastators as Bishops and Terminators as Rooks end up vastly faster and more mobile, never mind that a Devastator is pretty much a Tactical Marine weighed down by heavy weaponry while a Terminator's armor is in no way designed for speed.
The insistence on an infantry-only force compounds things yet further: a vehicle filling the role of a Rook or Bishop's high speed in a straight line would be more or less intuitive. This could in turn have allowed for making the Force Commander (ie King) be equipped in Terminator armor without losing any clarity at a glance to justify their sloth on the battlefield. (I'll admit I don't have a good answer for making a satisfying Queen on the Space Marines, but I already noted they're a poor base for this in the first place)
And bizarrely, what opportunities the lore provides to smooth this over are not taken. Terminators come with teleporters in 40k lore, yet Terminators in Regicide will simply walk or perhaps run, no matter how far they have to go. 'Meganobs' on the Orks are kitted out in their own unwieldy power armor, and could've been presented as tapping into their batteries when crossing large distances quickly, or something similar. They still trudge the whole way.
Related to all this is that the game -much like Battle Chess- went through the effort of custom-defining capture animations for each interaction, and unfortunately only a handful are fairly satisfying. Terminators are one of the most egregious, as they have a prominent Power Fist you'll rarely see them use, instead opting to just shoot the target for a few seconds and then walk up to its tile. I like the animation for Assault Marines (Knight) capturing Shoota Boys. (Pawn) It's quick and it has a real sense of physics to it. There's not many I can say the same for, and some of them seem to have actual errors in them: if a Tactical Marine captures a Stormboy (Knight, again), one part of the animation involves pressing their gun into the Stormboy's chin and shooting... while a chainsaw sound plays.
Normally I'd gloss over this kind of aesthetic thing, but the game outright lets you play it in the form of classical chess, just with a 40k aesthetic. Regicide mode is not presented as a preferred or primary mode except inasmuch as the game has a campaign and it's purely in Regicide mode.
But okay, so the aesthetic/conceptual end is wonky at best, but what about the Regicide mode's gameplay? How about that...
Campaign
The campaign is... uneven.
First a bit of background: in the campaign, there's always a primary objective, a secondary objective, and a fail condition. The primary objective is what you're meant to do to complete the mission, the secondary objective is unnecessary but is usually an additional challenge and if completed gives additional Requisition (In-game currency to unlock stuff) and experience. (There's a player level mechanic. It doesn't do a lot that I can tell) The fail condition is what you can't let happen or you're going to have to restart the mission.
A large number of missions in the game have the quality of their experience hinge heavily on how much you care about that secondary objective. If you don't care, many of these missions are fairly forgiving, if perhaps a bit boring. If you do care, the difficulty often spikes substantially, and in particular in many cases the random number generator becomes your nemesis-
Excuse me, Ghoul King, did you say 'random number generator'? In relation to a chess game?
Yyyyes. Yes I did.
Yeah, Regicide mode incorporates randomness. There's less than there could be, but regular attacks default to a chance to hit. At range you'll typically have a 50-70% chance to hit, depending on what unit is firing, and in melee it tends to be more like an 80-90% chance to hit. Attacks also have a chance for a critical hit, though I've no idea what the default value is -I'd guess something like 5% or less, based on how rarely they crop up, but the game doesn't mention it anywhere or even bother to tell you that critical hits have an innate chance of occurring. Crits themselves seem to be random even beyond that; as far as I can tell, the amount of damage they add on is random to a fairly significant degree.
Thankfully, those are the only two core random elements, and only a few special abilities invoke randomness. Most of them on the Orks, presumably because it's always been a thing in the tabletop version of 40k that Orks are heavy on randomness.
Anyway, the reason the RNG often becomes your nemesis is that by far the campaign's two favorite kinds of secondary objectives are:
1: Capture, not shoot to death, some specified set of enemy pieces.
or 2: Avoid losing some specified set of your pieces.
The former in particular places you in a situation where the pieces you're trying to capture are free to shoot at you, but you shouldn't waste the Initiative Points to shoot at them since a capture is an automatic instant kill without regard to current Wounds. Functionally, you're dealing with a puzzle game set in the framework of chess rules, only the enemy is constantly rolling dice to try to take away your pieces. You may well 'solve the puzzle', only for one of your key pieces to finally collapse under gunfire and so not be credited for figuring out the solution.
However, while most missions are okay-if-maybe-boring if you don't care much about secondary objectives, there's some missions where even completing the primary objective puts you in a nightmarish chess puzzle situation where you have to figure out exactly what the game wants you to do or else you will fail, and even if you do that the RNG may screw you over anyway.
And to be honest, the game's objectives have some dubious coding and possibly some dubious decisions, though with the bugginess it's hard to tell if some of these are even deliberate. One mission wanted me to use the Librarian's (Queen's) Life Leech ability three times. I ended up doing the mission twice due to another dubious decision on the part of the game (Short version: if you decide to play offline and then make an account, everything you accomplished offline won't be ported to your multiplayer account, not even if it was freshly-made and no account has ever been associated with your offline play), with the first time going just fine but with the second case I finished off the last enemy with the third Life Leech and didn't get the credit.
On a different mission, the primary objective was to kill all my enemies, and when only 2 were left the game suddenly declared me victorious. It's not just secondary objectives that are buggy or oddly-designed, and indeed one of the more bizarre decisions of the game is that you can succeed at a mission while failing to get the Requisition and experience from the primary objective by virtue of technically not achieving it. If, for example, your primary objective is to get a unit to a particular area of the board, the game will still give you victory and allow you to progress in the campaign if you instead wipe all your enemies off the map -you just won't get the rewards.
A particularly bizarre case was of a mission where the primary objective was to kill the Warboss (King) and the secondary objective was to kill everything. I painstakingly butchered every non-Warboss enemy and then put the Warboss into checkmate. This got me victory, it credited me the secondary objective... but not the primary objective.
Utterly bizarre.
So what about the...
Narrative
The story is bland and delivers information inelegantly. You're playing as the Blood Angels, so of course their 'curse' and the Death Company come up in the plot. The campaign quite reasonably assumes not every player has any idea about what I just mentioned, but the process of getting that information to you tends to have shades of 'as you know', and generally the story is failing to move forward as this information is provided. I don't simply mean that you have to sit through a couple of minutes of exposition before the mission briefing gets back to telling a story -I mean there are entire mission briefings that are nothing but exposition, and then the mission starts without any real context.
To be fair to the game, part of the problem is the reasonable-seeming decision to make Orks the opposing force. On the level of just playing a match, with quirky Ork graphics and so on, Orks make a lot of sense. Unfortunately, they're difficult to leverage as villains for a story, and Regicide's campaign tends to cut away the plot hooks it could have given itself to work around the problem. I could compare this to Dawn of War's original campaign, which also opened up with Orks as an enemy, but which not only moved its focus elsewhere eventually but even when those elements had yet to come into play the actual story was focused on the evacuation of civilians and the like. Stuff that could be achieved, and mean something, and did not directly engage the Orks narratively, using them primarily as something for you to fight in the gameplay. Regicide instead chooses to have all the civilians dead before the Blood Angels show up, and then when the Blood Angels learn of this their reaction is some horror/anger that doesn't change anything because they were already dead-set on cleansing the Orks from the planet.
But even taking into account how hard it is to use Orks as a direct antagonist for a story, the clunky delivery of exposition hurts the game, the nearly non-existent pool of characters hurts the game (You've got the Force Commander and the Librarian for actual characters on the Blood Angels, and Gobklaw the Warboss is the only enemy character in real terms), and while it's genuinely impressive to me that the campaign has 50 missions (Just for the Blood Angels' campaign! There's also an Ork campaign you can unlock) in it there's really not enough story to spread across that.
There's so little to it, in fact, that I don't have much to say about it.
So let's get back to...
Regicide Mode
Regicide Mode is a neat idea I wish had gone a bit further.
I'd sort of figured Regicide Mode would shake up the core chess rules. Maybe Pawns would instead all have King-style movement in Regicide mode. Maybe Rooks would have a limited number of tiles they could travel at once, instead of 'infinite until they hit something'.
Or maybe there'd be more indirect changes. Space Marine Rooks are Terminators: maybe they'd be able to teleport to somewhere within 3 tiles of their current location, radically changing how one uses Rooks as the Space Marines. Or maybe their durability would be emphasized, with them being able to activate an ability to become temporarily immune to captures.
The actual gameplay is sort of... layered atop conventional chess. When your turn comes by, you take a chess move: one unit moves under chess rules, potentially capturing a single enemy. After that is done, you're in the 'Initiative phase', and are given 3 Initiative points to work with. (You can actually store up to 5 at a time, but you gain 3 per turn) A unit performing either regular attack ("Snap Shot' for ranged, 'Assault' for melee) consumes 1 Initiative Point, so you can only fire 3 times per turn, and can only fire up to 5 times in a single turn. Additionally, a given unit can only perform an attack once per turn. Special abilities can also conflict with attacking, or merely with other special abilities: a Tactical Space Marine can toss a Frag Grenade, and this not only consumes 2 Initiative Points but also prevents that particular Tactical from using Snap Shot or Assault in the turn. A Devastator can Suppress an enemy and fire in a turn, but Suppression conflicts with Going To Ground (A stock ability that makes a unit take less damage, but the benefit goes away if they move) as well as their other ability. (Which you'd expect to improve their chance to hit, but in actuality increases their ranged damage until such time as they move)
There's other stuff the game never explains itself with cooldowns. Most unit-specific abilities have a cooldown preventing them from being used too often, but some of these cooldowns actually occur across the entire unit type. (eg tossing a Frag Grenade with any Tactical means no Tactical can toss another until the cooldown has passed)
On top of all that, you get four slots for abilities not specific to any particular unit. This is actually the only part of gameplay you get to customize in multiplayer: the Space Marines and Orks each have 12 such abilities, and you can use any arranged of their four so long as there's no duplicates. You can even do without such abilities entirely! These too burn Initiative Points and have cooldowns.
The whole thing is actually kind of chess-like in its own way: most turn-based strategy games allow every unit to do stuff every turn, independent of each other. Regicide Mode is not quite as strict as regular chess, but there's still a similar principle that simply outnumbering the enemy isn't as big a deal as you might expect: you can have seven units in range to fire on an enemy, and you won't actually be able to have them all take the shot. Most of the time, only three of them will be able to fire, and not even that if you're burning Initiative Points on other stuff.
Now, while I said earlier I'd have liked the game to go further, I do think there's some nifty stuff here. The main caveat to that is that the campaign is terrible at actually illustrating the niftiness of the system: as of this writing I'm around 80% of the way through the campaign while having done exactly one skirmish, but it was the one skirmish that got me to see how the Initiative phase can do some interesting things. No campaign mission has highlighted the system's strengths, and in fact they've tended to make the system seem as unlikable as possible. Most egregious is how often the loading screen asserts that what would be sacrificial in chess can be 'the start of a heroic combination. Take risks!' I'm sorry, if you're playing the campaign, that's a lie: do not take risks, the missions are carefully designed to punish taking risks.
The skirmish showed however that you can do genuinely interesting stuff in Regicide. You can go from having no pieces threatening the enemy's King to having two such pieces doing so, simply by moving one in position while the other is in position bar a pesky enemy you shoot out of the way. You can chip away at a Pawn formation with gunfire instead of having to either make a sacrifice or work at right angles to the problem. The need to juggle both the chess end of things and the Initiative end of things also adds a kind of depth to the game, where a player might get too focused on one end and overlook the other. That's a good thing, allowing players who have very different skills to still potentially meet on something like even ground.
I do wish, however, that the game reversed the phases. The Initiative phase would dramatically change the game if it was possible to, for example, gun down the Pawn blocking your Rook from the King and instantly win as a result. Blockades would be less reliable, and the game would be less trap-centric: in regular chess much of core play involves setting up situations where you can punish a move in a way that makes it not worthwhile (eg Rook takes Pawn, and then is immediately taken by another Pawn), and Regicide Mode not only doesn't change that but in fact gives you more rope to hang yourself with. Gunning down the enemy Pawn that was preventing their Rook from taking your Queen is a mistake if you don't have a trap already in place to punish exactly that, making things worse rather than better. Just switching the phases would thus be a paradigm shift, and make it a lot more interesting to compare and contrast 'classic' (ie regular chess) with Regicide.
--------------
Overall the game isn't as great as I would've liked, with some of its most basic decisions unfortunately contributing to the problem (ie these are not the kind of thing patching would fix), and unfortunately it seems to be more-or-less unsupported -for example, there's a 'daily reward' mechanic where you gain experience faster if you log in every day, but it's permanently stuck saying the next reward is 23 hours and 59 minutes away without ever giving such a reward- but it still manages to hold my attention as something rather unique.
Much more so than I'd have expected from 'chess in
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