Quarrel Review:

So have you ever had one of those moments where you just think to yourself, "I want to play both Risk and Scrabble, but I simply just can't decide?" Apparently someone at Denki thought it was an untapped demographic, and fused together
this quirky party title called Quarrel. It was originally available on the iOS platforms but recently revamped and put on Xbox Live Arcade, along with Avatar support and more multiplayer options.

I suppose it's redundant to try and explain what Quarrel is after my intro just now, but here goes nothing; in this game you have soldiers on provinces, and your goal is to overtake the entire map. Combat, instead of being done by dice rolls or a strategy game, is by playing a slightly fudged version of Scrabble. They take a word and scramble it until it's unrecognizable,
then you puzzle a word out of it. Match your points to your opponent's, and the one with the most wins. But what's cool is the
number of soldiers in your unit determines how many letters in a word you can spell out.

This puts a weird emphasis on strategy for a game that's as silly and casual as any other Avatar title. Since turns are all taken at once, you could charge offensively one round and, depending on how well you piece together words, either find yourself with a dominant victory or about to lose the game. It all falls back to how well you know your vocabulary. Regions with one or two soldiers fall easily to attacks, and reinforcements come at the beginning of your turn, so overextending hurts you even if you win the fights. And, despite it being based off of Risk, it doesn't take five million hours to finish a single game.

In design, it finds a terrific middle ground of being casual and simple without being sloppy. The game doesn't hand hold, it doesn't give an unfair advantage to first time players, and it isn't unbalanced. In fact, it's quite fun! There's very little reason to play against the computer - any of the game modes feel like normalized Arcade/Quick Play buttons - but any
friends, either couch or on Live, make for good opponents, even if it's not as convenient as checking your phone on lunch breaks.

Graphics are what you expect from an Xbox Live title. Lots of color, family-friendly design, and an emphasis on accessibility and getting lots of use out of those Avatars you, if you're like me, spent all of thirty seconds on. The visuals are clean and crisp, and there's not a stutter in frame rate in sight. The maps the game has vary in look and design, but are easy to understand, and rely on red and blue to distinguish between allied/enemy territories. This might cause problems for the
colorblind.

See 'Graphics.' The audio is full of family-oriented, bubbly sound effects and elevator music to keep things lively during matches and matchmaking. There's nothing that stands out especially, both good and ill - no theme song that really resonated, no sound bit that made me laugh, but likewise nothing was irritating enough to offend or irritate.

Being an Arcade multiplayer title, there's not a lot of longevity to be had. The game modes feel like typical fighting game standards, like Quick Play and Arcade, as I mentioned earlier. This either could be a weekly ritual for you and your friends, that one weekend night that every single board game commercial assumes you have, or it could be a one-shot weekend party for your friends. Either way, it's meant to be multiplayer dedicated.

To be honest, though I find no flaws with the game, I've always felt a bit put off by these kind of social, mobile games ported to consoles. Maybe it's because I lack the family that these games seem marketed towards, but it feels like a game built around taking turns could be done throughout a week. The game shines on XBLA, however, by only being 400 MSP, which closely matches its iPhone brother. At that cost, there's little reason not to just try it out to see if you and a friend like it.