Carcassonne - Review
Added July 8th, 2007 by Slunks
Board games have always existed on one console or another. For the Xbox 360’s Live Arcade, they’re slowly starting to dig their way to the surface. However, instead of seeing your popular Milton Bradley and Hasbro games, we’ve recently received created games from Germany. Sierra Online’s latest addition, Carcassonne, shares a similar style and presentation to the first XBLA board game, Catan. While Carcassonne lacks the gameplay depth of Catan, it offers a much more consistent pace and an easier to comprehend rule-set, which should appeal to those looking for a simple and easy to understand experience.
As stated, Carcassonne is an easy game to pick up and play no matter your experience level. Whether or not you’ve taken a run through the tutorial, you’ll find that Carcassonne’s simple-minded gameplay mechanics are easy-going. You and your opponents take turns being dealt and placing one of seventy available tiles. Each tile represents a piece of terrain, from roads, dirt-like pieces for cities, and field areas for monasteries and farms. Scoring points is all about enclosing a section of tiles by leaving no opening of any other type of tile. For example, your city must have no gaps to the open, it must be entirely enclosed. You should keep in mind that no tile placed is automatically yours, as you’ll have to place one of your seven followers on the tile you plant. Even though it’s optional to place a follower, you’ll have to do so in order to accumulate points.
Once obtaining your points from a section of tiles, you’ll gain the corresponding follower back. Since you can only use a total of seven followers at one time, you may find yourself running out of them. You’ll need to play it safe by making sure you’ll eventually enclose and gain back said followers. Otherwise, you may find yourself placing a follower in a tough position where it will never be scored upon, meaning you’ll never gain it back. The game will repeatedly go back and forth, giving players’ tiles to place so they may place them in a desire to score points. Once all of the tiles are dispersed, the game ends. Any unfinished sections are tallied up and added to the respective owner’s score. Even though the gameplay may be fun, yet mind-bogglingly simple once you get the hang of things, there’s not much strategy to be had. Unfortunately, that may make the game a bit tedious after a few dozen rounds. Since changes in your plan may occur unexpectedly, it’s hard to go in with an intention to think ahead.
Undoubtedly, playing with people over Xbox Live is more engaging than with the AI. Carcassonne supports from two to five players in the same game. Having five different people in your game may sound as if it’ll only boost up the time you have to wait until it’s your turn; it actually speeds up the pace of play. Everyone seems to throw down tiles fast as they can, trying to claim land, rather than taking their time to carefully strategize. This is because the amount of tiles and land do not enlarge when adding more people; making Carcassonne an ideal game to play with about two or three people. If you do tire of the same mode of play, Carcassonne offers a variety of customizable rules. You may adjust how scoring is implemented, and there’s even an expansion freely available entitled The River. In this mode, you and your opponents build a river for a dozen rounds, then resume back to normal play. It’s a cool edition, although it doesn’t change the premise of the game too much.
Although Carcassonne doesn’t necessarily have the most admirable graphics, it holds up well as an arcade game. While the graphical effects and interface are crisp, the background is a rather bland field; it would have been nice to change this at will. Despite that, the game manages to be clean. Although that can be said for the game’s look, it cannot be said for the audio. The correct sounding effects are in place, but the background music involves a short, droopy medieval loop. Fortunately, there is an option to turn it off. Another flaw that puts a hole in the barrel is the camera control. It does a fine job for the first few rounds staying zoomed in. When there are enough tiles you zoom out and are unable to you see everything as clear as you’d like to. It’s not that you can’t see all of the tiles in-play, rather it’s that you just cannot achieve a close enough view of them; leaving you to zoom in and out much more than you’d like.
Summary:
Although Carcassonne may not have the depth of strategy that you see in Catan, it still holds its own as a stable addition to the Live Arcade. Unlike Catan, just about anyone can learn how to play with easy to learn gameplay mechanics, making it a fun game play for gamers of all kinds. Simply said, if you enjoyed Catan, it’s most likely that Carcassonne is worth the 800 points.
