'Quarrel' is pretty great when it's not being really dumb By Ben Hornsby edge contributor ben.8127@gmail.com Let's be super critical! "Quarrel" spends all its time making mistakes. It was dumped clumsily onto Xbox Live last week, and every bit of it demands vicious nitpicking. Ultimately it is Just Another Scrabble Game, and it won't succeed in drawing anyone away from either actual analog "Scrabble" or from "Words With Friends" ("Scrabble II"). First, biggest, hugest, most perfectionistly specific fault: You can't turn down the sound effects. This wouldn't be a huge problem if any one of the following stars didn't align: First, it's a silly online multiplayer word game, which means that you are going to want to listen to music while you play it after your first 11 minutes; second, playing muted videogames is always weird and awkward, for the simple reason that you don't get any aural feedback when you click your cursor around; third, the non-cursor-click sound effects in "Quarrel" are numerous and obnoxious, and listening to the sound of your troops squealing and throwing bomb-letters at your opponents after a victory is grating from victory one. The squealing and bomb-throwing are tied into the game's second biggest fault, which is that there is squealing and bomb-throwing in the game. There's a back-of-the-box-style bullet point on the website: "Control hilarious and whimsical animated troops that engage in battle." No, thanks! If you could pretend I'm an adult (it's not that hard; I do it all the time), that would be great. It is literally impossible that anybody that wants to take this game seriously could think these little animations are cute after their first hour of watching them. By including lengthy unskippable animations, you are pandering exclusively to people that do not want to play your game. Why would you do that? And anyway, these whimsical animated troops are not hilarious. They range from eye-roll-eliciting pirates and ninjas to a cringe-inducing ambiguous tribe of brown-skinned, leopard-print-wearing islanders. The goofy colorful islands and blobby cartoon text already make the game feel like it's taking cues from some free-to-play Facebook app you can't quite remember, and the painfully predictable caricature-characters in the iOS version definitely come straight out of the Zynga School of Safe Art Design (not that Xbox Live Avatars are that much of an improvement). Other missteps pepper the experience. You can't review the last round's stats from the pre-game lobby; players that drop out of a game are replaced by AI opponents with no chance for other humans to jump back in; AI players always wait until their timer is just about to run out to play their words, even if you got yours out in two seconds; single-player modes are insultingly cluttered; the tutorial, which could be breezy and fun, instead spends 15 minutes telling you what words to make. The dirty secret: I'm only being mean because I like this game so much. It's close to being pretty good! It's "Scrabble" with the rubbery push-pull of "Risk," and at its core is the head-on-head rush of looking at eight letters and trying to figure out what word you can make out of them before your friend can. That's a nice little intellectual friction, right there! If this game had all the same mechanics, traded in its "Sims Social" graphics for something more minimalist, cut out the numerous momentum-killing time pockets between turns, and let me join an ongoing match where players were jumping in and dropping out freely, I'd give it four stars for getting me to stop shyly tabbing over to "Words With Friends" twice a day. Maybe in "Quarrel 2"? Until then I guess I'll play regular "Scrabble" with my regular friends. Did you know regular "Scrabble" doesn't have embarrassing graphics or drawn out animations? In fact there are no animations at all, until somebody bumps the table. And there are no Achievments, or advertisements! Why do I even have this Xbox? two stars (out of four) Ben Hornsby is looking forward to February, when games about jumping and shooting start coming out again. Also something something Aaron Waite namedrop (for solidarity).