It’s been a while since my last review, thanks to the holiday hangover in regards to game releases, but today I get back into the saddle with my review of Quarrel for the Xbox Live Arcade.  Quarrel was originally released for the iOS market a few months ago from developer Denki, due to the fact that they couldn’t find a publisher to release the game for any other system, until now.  The XBLA version of Quarrel is far superior to the iOS version in almost every way, with online multiplayer and more game content, such as additional game modes.  This version may have more bells and whistles the last version to be released, but is Quarrel any good?  Let’s get into the game and find out.

Gameplay:

The premise behind Quarrel reminds me a lot of the old Reece’s Peanut Butter Cup commercials, where you had two great things that somehow got mixed together to make an even better thing.  With Quarrel, you have a game that essentially is like what if Risk and Scrabble had an illegitimate love child that got sold to Microsoft and put onto the Live Arcade.

The game of Quarrel is set on a tropical island map that is divided up into sectors that belong to one of the players.  Each turn, the player in command has two options, either reinforce his sectors by moving troops or by attacking one of his or her opponents.  After each turn, the game will give the player reinforcements automatically to help the player shore up the defenses of his or her sectors prior to the next player’s turn.  This section of the game play for Quarrel very much feels like Risk, but the game completely changes once combat begins between two players.

When the players enter combat, they are given an anagram of a word.  For those that are less inclined to remember your old English class days, an anagram is a word that has been created from another word.  With this anagram, you have to create the word that is worth the highest value that also fits into your slot available.  The slots that are available for your word is based on how many people you have defending or attacking in your sector.  For example, if I have five ninjas invading my opponent, who only has three pirates defending, when combat begins I have five slots for my word while he has only three for his word.  Then each letter that you use has a different value to it, just like Scrabble.  Sure, you can use RAIN in a four-letter word, but WOW will be worth much more, even though it is one letter less in length.

The winner of combat gets to either keep his or her land or invades and takes over the other sector, depending on what role the winner had as attacker or defender.  If the defender successfully wins while having less people then the attacker, the defender gets to take prisoners, and this really helps build up your defense when you are running low on people.  I personally thought this was a really neat concept, since it rewards those that create a higher value word with less spaces, but it also looks funny when the prisoner is redressed into your character’s clothing while still keeping their own unique head graphic, but more on the aesthetics of this game later.

Quarrel has a ton of different game types to play that the original iOS release did not get.  Since it is on XBLA, Quarrel is fully online supported for up to four players in both ranked and casual matches.  The only issue I had with the online game play was finding people to play against.  What is nice here is that Quarrel will put you into a single player game if no matches can be found, so at least your playing soon either way instead of looking at a loading screen for an hour.  Quarrel also had a challenge mode that pits the player against certain situations, and a domination mode where the single player goes through a variety of maps and opponents to dominate the chain of islands in Quarrel.

My only negative in regards to the game play of Quarrel is that there is no local multiplayer, which I can understand why but it is still a shame.  The game would be a blast to play with friends and family as everyone is sitting on the couch, but it would be very difficult to hide one player’s word from another.  It would be like playing Call of Duty via split screen and not looking at your opponent’s side of the television to see where they are camping.  It’s an understandable decision by Denki, but I would still love to play this with my family in the same room.

Overall, the game play of Quarrel was top notch and worked perfectly.  With the minor gripe of missing local multiplayer support, everything else about Quarrel on the Xbox 360 is far superior then the original release for the iOS.

Aesthetics and Sound:

     The aesthetics of Quarrel is what makes the fun game a joy to play.  The game is a very brightly colored world that uses primary colors to delineate the player sectors from each other.  The design of each player’s army is where the game gets most of its personality, though.  Each player is assigned a random army of Soldiers, Pirates, Ninjas, Robots, or even Mimes.  There are other armies out there, but these seemed to be the predominate armies that I ran into.  As your army moves across the board or enter into combat, you can hear tiny little voice bits that give your army a voice.  For instance, when the Pirate army moves to invade another sector, you will hear tiny little voices saying “yar!” as they move into combat.  For any of my guild mates in World of Warcraft, you already understand how funny that was to me.

Quarrel is an excellent example of how simple graphics does not automatically mean an ugly game.  Quarrel uses a fun and silly aesthetic design and a bright primary color palate to make the world of Quarrel an enjoyable and fun place to spend some time.

Final Thoughts:

Quarrel is a great blend of Risk and Scrabble that makes sense.  Using the map idea and movement of armies from Risk, Quarrel then throws you into a contest of vocabulary to win that battle, just like Scrabble.  The aesthetics of the game are simple, fun and bright and works very well with the game design.  The small amounts of voice acting that is found in this game also worked very well and made me smile more times then naught.  My only gripe is that the developers couldn’t quite make local multiplayer work, but I understand how hard that would have been for this type of game, so the gripe is only a minor one.  Quarrel is a fun strategy/word play game that is a steal for only 400 Microsoft Points and is available now.