Quadrato

Collect squares instead of avoiding circles

Reviewed by Shawn from afro-ninja.com

Following the ever-popular trend of minigames that are comprised of basic shapes and polygons, Quadrato mixes it up a little by making us draw circles around our squared targets to catch them. It’s a neat idea but like many of its predecessors, it does a bad job of evening out the difficulty levels.

When you base a minigame around one core concept, that concept must be executed very well for it to work. While the concept is good, it’s once again the difficulty level that throws a wrench into the gears. The object here is to draw a virtual circle around the squares that appear on the screen. Circling one turn it red, to which you can then freely touch it with your cursor to ‘collect’ it. Touch it otherwise and your score will reset and you’ll be back to base 1. As you collect more squares they will appear more often, and move faster. In my opinion this increase in difficulty needed to be evened out much more. You can hit a score of 10-15 with no problems, but the climb from 15-20 and beyond is like hitting a wall. There’s simply too much square activity to be able to draw full circles around them.

Quadrato uses an unlock system similar to Orbus Impetus, in that you must get to a certain high score to unlock things. Instead of unlocking cheats though you unlock new modes. Difficulty aside, the unlock system here is more manageable. Unlocks are ten points apart, instead of 20, 30, etc. It takes a few tries to reach 20, and some patience to get 30. Not so sure about 40 though. Advanced mode adds some nice variety, although you pretty much only have a chance to experience one bonus per play. Hope you start off with a frenzy or invincibility powerup and make the most of it, cause after that you wont be making it too much farther.

The graphics are too simple for a game like this. The only special effect you’re going to see is some particles exploding when you collect a square. Other than that everything is plain white and plain red. It would have helped if the main cursor was a distinctly different color than the blocks, because it’s pretty easy to lose your white cursor in a flurry of white and light gray obstacles. Sound on other hand was nicely chosen (I particularly liked the cymbal sfx for collecting a square) and complements the simple but clean interface and presentation.

The other problem with basing your game around a core concept is that if there’s any bugs in the execution of that concept, it hurts gameplay tremendously. Quadrato doesn’t have any glaring bugs, but the task of circling around the blocks doesn’t always seem to work right. A lot of times you don’t have to make a full circle around the block to collect it, while other times you can make an apparent full circle and not get it. It’s also impossible to collect blocks that are by the edges of the screen, because the game wont calculate a circle from where your pointer exits and re-enters the screen. Most of your time is spent in the middle of the board, but still. Quadrato gives us yet another inventive take on the mouse avoider game, but needs to seriously rethink its game plan before showing us a sequel.

Click here to play Quadrato






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