Richard Cobbet has reviewed Chaos Reborn:

Chaos Reborn

Your love for or frustration with Chaos Reborn, the remake of that Julian Gollop game that’s not Laser Squad or X-COM, hinges on one question: do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, no doubt lovely and intelligent person? It’s a game of surprising depth and complexity, where wizards wage war with powerful spells and summoning hideous beasts to fight in their name—but it’s also one where, totally guaranteed, your dragon with a 90% chance to clobber the enemy in the next hex will fail miserably five times in a row, only to be casually annihilated by a passing goblin.

This isn’t so much a design choice as a line drawn in the sand, not between good and bad, but by a philosophical divide almost as deep—exactly as Hearthstone players are currently torn between appreciating its random elements for spicing up rounds and objecting to each new element that puts success at the whim of invisible dice, which detracts from the purity of deck-building and skill based play.

As with Hearthstone, it’s not that simple. Chaos Reborn is a fiendish game on its own terms, and one with a high skill ceiling. Managing luck is simply part of that. When summoning a card or casting a spell, you only have a percentage chance of it actually working. If it doesn’t, you burn the card. However, that chance is malleable in a couple of basic ways. You can cast magic to slowly bring the general aura of the map over to either Law or Chaos, making your spells and summons more effective, or spend mana points to directly boost the chances of a spell creating a snarling hellbeast instead of a sad magic fizzle.

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There’s also a single-player mode called Realms of Chaos, which plays like a simplified Disciples/Age of Wonders. This gives you a map to explore. You must recruit helpers in towns and fight a timer to avoid being Banished. It’s not a mode worth buying the game for in and of itself, but it’s a well-implemented and surprisingly comprehensive bonus feature on top of the core skirmish action, with just enough scripting and scope to let good worlds stand out.

Chaos Reborn lives and dies on its combat though, and it hasn’t lost any of its charm since the original version. Sadly, the community is a small one, which can make it hard to get a good game going. That in turn puts more reliance than there should be on the single-player side. It deserves a bigger player-base though, as provided you embrace its fundamental love of random chance and don't mind rolling with punches, it’s a fantastic tactical game with far more than luck on its side.

Score: 87/100

A true wizard’s wheeze, and a fine return for one of gaming’s oldest tactical classics.