Quarrel Review (XBLA)

Quarrel (XBLA)
Developed By: Denki
Published By: UTV Ignition
Date of Release: January 25, 2012
Price: 400MSP



It has often been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. In quarrel's case, it's more like a game that is worth much much more than a thousand words. You see, Quarrel is an epic game of Word Domination that plays out like the best bits of Scrabble mixed with Risk. An eclectic choice perhaps, but it is one that fits together quite marvelously like the smooth chocolate and creamy peanut butter of a certain nommy confection that you are all aware of.




The gameplay in Quarrel is deceptively simple: you have a map split up into territories much like in Risk. Each territory is color coded and populated with armies of foot soldiers in groups of between 1 and 8 for each player, with the distribution of armies decided randomly (but evenly) at the start of battle. The object of Quarrel is to defeat the enemy armies by creating a higher scoring word out of the letters given to you at the start of each round. The catch is that you may only use as many letters out of the given 8 as you have soldiers in your territory. Any ties are decided by whoever was the quickest to come up with a word.




In my times with quarrel I had a grand time playing against both the razor sharp AI and against random players online. There is no local multiplayer in quarrel, for the obvious reason that the game would be spoiled if you could see your foe's words. I did run into a few stuttering skips in the music and animations as I played, but nothing that detracts from the sheer fun factor of this title. Quarrel is a well rounded puzzler that takes a good amount of fast thinking to win the day. It is well worth the asking price of 400MSP, and should be in the XBLA collection of any player who enjoys word games.