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The good is very good, the bad is very bad. The good: If you are out to learn chess, or hone your skills through tutorials, you might very well want to spend your money on Chessmaster. The tutorial sections are excellent, and what better way to learn chess than through the engaging live-teaching by IM Josh Waitzkin; a truly gifted chess teacher. The interface is clear, and the chess sets pretty - and at it's strongest level, the engine can give most GM's a run for their money. Sure, there are somewhat stronger engines out there, but why on Earth would you need something stronger? Unless you rank yourself among the likes of Kasparov, CM will beat you every time anyway. There are various "personalities" you can choose from, if you aren't quite ready to face off with the full fury of CM - the personalities are rated from the very beginner all the way to grandmaster level, and supposedly capture something of the playing styles of the people the "personalities" are modeled after. Which brings me to the Bad: The personalities are all schichophrenic; one moment they play like a GM, and the next they trade a knight for a pawn without any compensation; in a way that no human, no matter how low rated, would do. It appears that the way the game "simulates" low level play, is simply to play normally, and then throw in a random move every now and then. The result is that the games you play against low level and mid level CM personalities all end up very similar: you try to develop normally, your opponent throws away a piece for nothing more than minor initiative, and then begins playing flawlessly for a while, driving you to defend. If you defend accurately, eventually you'll be rewarded by another insane move that allows you to gain more material. And then it's back to defense again - repeat this cycle untill your material advantage allows you to dominate, even against accurate play. There is nothing whatsoever in the way of actually trying to simulate human-like play, and you'll soon get very bored playing against the Chesmaster personalities. But the absolutely worst aspect of the game is the online play feature, and the fact that support has completely given up on it; complaints and requests for fixes go unheard, or at least unresponded. First, when the game was released, you were allowed to use the "chess coach" in rated online games! Whoever thought of that, must have forgotten to take their medication that morning. They fixed that "feature" in the patch they released, along with other fixes to numerous bugs reported by people - but the problem is that installing this patch is optional, and completely up to the user; as a result, all those who rather like having the advantage of chess coach during their online games simply won't patch up. Furthermore, people are not really informed of the existence of the patch in any visible way, and so many simply don't know to look for it. And because of this, the bugs remain - only some people have patched up, and those play at a disadvantage, plus suffer from all the connection and database storage problems caused by the unpatched games. And support won't do anything about this, nor will they respond to questions as to why they don't do something about this. All suggestions as to what to do about the problems are concistently ignored, and have been for months now. Many long time fans of the series, myself included, are very disillusioned by how this potentially great game has been abandoned by Ubisoft. As can be expected the "thriving chess community" isn't thriving very well, nor are there many there to thrive. So in conclusion, if you buy it for the tutorials, you won't be disappointed. If you bought it to play against the computer, you'll be longing for humand opponents very fast, and finally, if you bought it for online play, well, I'm sorry for you - you just completely wasted your money. If it weren't for the tutorials, I'd give the game a single star for the lack of support, and totally botched up online play. May Ubisoft give thanks to Josh and the other chess experts that still associate with the series for the three stars in this review.