We'd love to bring you a review of word-meets-strategy game Quarrel today, the day of the game's appearance on Xbox Live Arcade, but while our minds are willing, our bodies are somewhat preoccupied. There's a lot of Mass Effect 3 coverage on the way, and the small matter of a magazine to publish. So here are some quick, off-the-cuff impressions from me flavoured with Matt's (not entirely positive) remembrances of the touchscreen original.
Quarrel is a colourful, bouncy turn-based strategy title in which letters are bullets. You move small happy soldiers from region to region, receiving more soldiers each turn for every region you control. When armies clash, players assemble words from randomly selected letters to decide the outcome, with more soldiers equalling longer words. Risk with a dash of Scrabble, in short.
Those who do buy for offline enjoyment can look forward to a range of modes, at least. Domination is the nearest the game has to a story mode, a trip across the islands of Quarrel which encompasses both head-to-heads and four-way mash-ups. Showdown pits you against individual AI generals, and Challenge mode sees you completing custom scenarios. It's a shame there's only four of the latter, but what's on offer seems exciting: you might have to stage a miraculous comeback, for instance.
At 400 MP, Quarrel's hardly going to give you wallet-seizures, and from what we've played, it's a fairly classy genre hybrid - albeit one you may be better off sampling online. If anagrams and flanking manoeuvres entice, queue up your download here.