Quadroscope is an arcade style Tetris-clone with a charming retro feel. It involves placing Tetris style blocks in 1 of 4 area to fill out their respective rows. The game gets rid of some of Tetris's shortcomings, but it still falls short of being a satisfying experience.
The game centers around placing blocks to complete rows in your four areas. In each new block, there is one central physical block that cannot pass through your existing blocks. Usually there are also white blocks that signify where you will place new blocks, but those can pass through your existing blocks. That is a nice way of preventing the frustrating Tetris feature of weaseling in a difficult piece. One key difficulty in this game, however, is that you can only place your new blocks in pre-existing rows. Given that the game only seems to give you block types that will be useful, this isn't much of a inhibitor, but it still hampered long term strategy options.
I still don't understand the red text either. Seemed fairly random...
The strength of the game comes from deciding which side to send your block. As I just mentioned, I believe the game only spawns blocks that you can actually use, so deciding where it should go (or rather, where the game knows it can and should go) is the main mechanic. This works fairly well, but usually the selection process was either too easy or too meaningless. The game frequently produces 2 or 3 sides that need identical piece types, making that mechanic quite brain-free.
A single block? Seriously?
The controls weren't terrible, but they weren't great either. There was a bit of a snap-to-place function, but you still had to get things pretty exact for it to count. And it was painfully easy to slide past where you wanted to go. There's also a dash command to quickly slide pieces in, but I really was never able to line that up well enough to save me any time, so it produced more anger than it relieved.
The gameplay unfortunately doesn't really evolve past the core mechanic. You're placing pieces, that's it. The game slowly ramps up the difficulty by dropping random block on your four sides faster, but it's not to the degree of crazy later Tetris levels when the blocks move so fast you can barely track them. And unlike the frantic falling in Tetris, this game has no real suspense. As the game sped up, I really didn't find myself caring. I was actually just waiting for the game to end at the point. I had no desire to continue. I found myself anxiously waiting the random block counter to tick down and put me out of my misery.
I would not recommend this game. It's a Tetris clone with an okay gimmick, but it's missing all the charm and the pure suspense of the original title. Honestly, I'd say you should avoid this game and go play a flash version of Tetris instead. You'll enjoy your time quite a bit more.
Scorecard:
Category
|
Score
|
Time Value
|
3
|
Money Value
|
10
|
Originality
|
7
|
Ryplayability
|
3
|
Fulfillment
|
1
|
Final Score
|
4.8
|
Let me know what you think of Quadrocope (if you decide to play it)!
Until next time,
Ryan
Pictures courtesy of Armor Games
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