Quadradius

You just have to play it

Reviewed by Shawn from afro-ninja.com

Quadradius is an online multiplayer flash game that takes the skeleton of the checkers board game and pumps it up with a massive list of powerups and new strategies. In fact, calling it checkers doesn’t do it very much justice.

In Quadradius the object is to eliminate all of your opponent’s pieces by jumping on top of them with your own. This is where the simplicity ends though. As you play powerups are randomly placed on the board at set intervals. You can collect multiple powerups with one piece, and use any number of them before moving a piece in your turn. At first, powerups like ‘move diagonal’ and ‘move again’ might seem like standard fare, but if you take a look at the game’s faq you’ll see the list is pretty extensive, and allows for many combo possibilities. Some of the more advanced powerups at your disposal: recruit opposing pieces, destroy opposing pieces, drop bombs, steal opponent’s powers, learn copies of your own powers, and so on. What’s more, almost all of these powerups come in three varieties- row, column, and radial. When you collect powerups all that your opponent will see is that you have one in your possession, offering no clues as to what they actually are. Lastly, a whole new layer of depth is added by the fact that each tile on the board has five different depth levels. Each tile starts in the middle, but can be raised and lowered by the use of various powerups. Tiles one level above can be climbed but tiles two levels or more prevent you from moving (again, there’s a powerup that can fix this) so as you can see things get complicated quick.

The graphics in Quadradius are very professional looking and suit the game great. A lot of the powerups in the game affect the look of the pieces, so a lot of time was spent to ensure that they not only look nice, but can be easily distinguished from other pieces by the powers they have activated (and combined, for that matter). I only have one minor complaint with the graphics- when playing a custom game with lots of pieces the game can slow down sometimes due to the massive effect that certain powerups have on areas of the board. When someone uses a scramble column and it affects three different columns with twenty pieces each, it can be a long wait for everything to take effect.

Quadradius is free to play for anyone that logs on, but you’ll be limited to guest status and wont be able to set up any custom options for the game. Quadradius offers subscription plans- you can try it out for a month, a few months, or a year. But if you’re gonna pay ten bucks for a yearly account, you might as well just pay fifteen for a lifetime membership. I rarely ever decide to subscribe to an online game, but Quadradius convinced me pretty fast. With a paid account you can register a username and your win/loss stats will be tracked and ranked. You can set up custom games and change options such as board size, squadron size, squadron color, and time limits. Lastly, you’ll be in on ‘new power Tuesday,’ where on the first Tuesday of every month a new powerup is introduced for members only to use. Cool stuff.

Quadradius is a deep strategy game that is a lot of fun to play and guarantees an original gameplay experience each time. As balanced as the game is there’s a small element of randomness to it. Random is ok, but in some cases the random factor can throw off the game too much. Opponents can receive an unfair amount of powerups sometimes, even when they’re clearly at an advantage. Also, with the combination of certain powerups you can clear off entire sections of the board in a single turn. Even then comebacks are very much possible, so it’s always anyone’s game. The powerup scenarios and combinations I’ve mentioned so far hardly scratch the surface of what can occur in this game, so head over to quadradius.com and try it out for yourself. Quadradius is still a very small project run by a couple of college guys- so if you like it, go ahead and toss some money their way and enjoy the benefit of e-bragging rights and unlimited replay value.

Click here to play Quadradius






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