There may never be a more accurate way to sum up the experience of using a smartphone than Kieran Haden’s new iOS game: Quadracade. Players face a random collection of retro-inspired mini-games that on their own are each easy to beat, but here you’re challenged to play four of them at the same time.
Every time you pick up your smartphone you probably find yourself jumping between texting friends, checking social media feeds, reading emails, and hundreds of other tasks and apps that are all vying for your attention in one way or another. It sounds like Quadracade takes that idea one step further by putting all those distractions side-by-side on a single screen, and letting you at least rack up a high score that could show up on the game’s online leaderboard.
In Quadracade players start with a small collection of simple retro games but can eventually unlock more than 30 virtual cartridges as they progress, with even more promised in future updates by the developer. Power-ups become available during play which can help boost a player’s score or slow down the action which makes it much easier to stay on top of what’s happening in each corner of their screen, but the best feature is the option to switch out any games a player finds themselves losing at, which are randomly replaced with another title they must immediately jump into.
The pure chaos of the Quadracade reminds us a bit of the WarioWare series from Nintendo, which bombards players with an unending onslaught of challenging mini-games. Those still just come one-by-one, however, so we’re excited to challenge our multitasking skills when Quadracade is officially released for the iPhone and iPad on February 20.