Adrenaline Review

The fuzz of the teleporter clears and you find yourself in a large room lit with bright yellow lights. Doorways lead off into other rooms, each more colourful than the last. But you’re not alone! Beside you a bizarre alien has just materialised and grabs a powerful looking sword from the rack of weapons behind you. With a flick of a switch the blade begins to hum, glowing threateningly, and before you can react it is swinging towards you with tremendous force! A savage blow! A killing blow!

And yet you don’t feel pain, you feel… good! You grab a gun and start firing. Rockets, lasers, bullets burn through the rooms as more creatures join the fray, but every hit you take only makes you faster, stronger! Muhahaha! You are a God amongst – oh. One explosion too many hits and you go down. But with barely a moments hesitation you’re back where you begun with gun in hand. What are you waiting for!? Get back in the fight!

adrenaline

 

Players: 3-5

Time: 30-60 mins

Ages: 12+

 

Adrenaline is a surprising game from a company that likes to surprise. Czech Games Edition is the company behind Codenames, one of the most innovative party games of the last decade, the year before they released Alchemists, one of the first board games to use a built in app, two years earlier we had Tzolk’in, history’s most bewildering quest for corn and one of the most unique worker placement games, nay board games, around. You would be forgiven for not associating the term “Euro game” with an all action shoot ‘em up, yet not only is that exactly what you have here, it works!

ADrenaline 4 player

And it works because it lives under the shining layer of flashy weapons and crazy ideas you do expect. First and foremost Adrenaline gives you junkies all the action stuff you could hope for. Awesome minis, a blistering array of weapons all illustrated with a first person perspective (such a great touch) and cinema. Shooting a gun has you throwing that card from your hand down on to the table in what has to be one of the most satisfying actions you can make in board gaming. It’s such a small thing and yet gives your guns the closest thing to a real physical impact you could hope for.

Beneath that lies the unexpected euro elements, and I for one am so glad they are there. So, yes, you spend much of your time in Adrenaline shooting people. But you must also manage your ammunition, for these powerful weapons are greedy beasts, and while shooting someone gives you the satisfaction of handing them a healthy (or unhealthy…) pile of player-specific wounds, scoring is a subtler proposition. When a player finally takes their last wound, you score points according to who managed to wound them the most, then second most, then third etc, etc. There’s a bonus for being the first to get a kill and an end game reward for finishing someone off. But importantly the scoring system encourages you to mix up your targets and not just pick on one player continuously.

Adrenaline Wounds

Being hit is no problem either and, at the start, is almost desirable! Taking 3 wounds lets you move an extra space when you grab something (like weapons or ammo), taking another 3 hits gives you the incredibly useful ability to move an extra space when shooting. Of course, once you reach this point it won’t be too long before someone finishes you off. But that’s not so bad either! When a player dies one of the red plastic skulls at the top of the board is dropped on to their player board to block off the highest victory point slot. From now on, they’re worth fewer points.

All of this comes together to ensure that you’re constantly switching targets, no one feels ganged up on because doing so would be pretty poor strategy. And taking damage helps! You feel very little animosity to anyone who shoots you, which ironically is exactly the opposite of how I feel when playing an actual First Person Shooter. Isn’t this so much better!? It also means that running away and hiding just isn’t a very good strategy – you’re encouraged to run out into the thick of it and give as good as you get. A far more exciting way to play!

Adrenaline Hand

Into this feeds Adrenaline’s resource management system, aka ammo. There are 3 different types represented by different coloured cubes and each gun needs some number of those to pick up and reload. The more powerful the weapon, the more ammo it eats, ensuring you’ll need to spend time hunting down its ammo. This is easy enough to do, every space aside from the spawn points (where you collect weapons) has a tile showing some combination of ammo cubes and bonus cards. Grabbing a tile lets you move the corresponding ammo from your pool to your immediate supply, but doing so means spending actions where you’re not shooting. Plus, you can only grab tiles within a limited range, meaning positioning on the board is key if you don’t want to spend your entire turn chasing down that elusive ammo your sniper rifle needs!

Now, of course there is some luck involved here but goodness, nobody only uses one gun! You can carry up to 3 and by trying to balance their ammo requirements you can ensure you’re never far from a useful pickup. And having multiple weapons is where the fun really begins! The variety of options is great: everything from lightning swords to heat seeking rocket launchers to the humble (and brutal) shotgun. You will see every weapon pass through the supply in a 5 player game, but you won’t get to play with them all yourself and they all have you experiencing very different turns.

Adrenaline Close Up

Fundamentally, everything does damage, but the variety in ranges and fire modes and special quirks offer up so many options. Like firing your black hole cannon to suck an opponent close enough to smash them with your hammer. You also need to decide (with certain weapons) whether to power up your shots by spending some of your precious ammo. Obviously the correct answer to that question is yes but can you afford to? The last thing you want to do is leave yourself defence – well, “offence-less”!

Importantly, variety doesn’t come from individual weapons, it comes from their combination, with the feel of playing the game tied to the set of weapons you used that game. One game saw me going full melee weapons, and really chasing players across the board (I even won that one!) You can very much define your own game, so long as that definition includes getting stuck in! If you need even more variety, there are two whole extra game modes included to go crazy with!

Adrenaline skulls

The “standard” mode is a straightforward death match. Each time you kill an opponent, your final wound is moved up to the skull track at the top of the board, which forms one last region of area control at the end of the game. The new modes replace that final scoring with something altogether different. Domination Mode has you competing to control the 3 spawn points over the course of the game. Instead of shooting an opponent, you can shoot the spawn point to add a wound token to the corresponding track, or if you end your turn stood at the spawn point you’ll also add a wound token. Each spawn point has its own separate track that will be scored at the end of the game. Watch out though, because the spawn points will shoot back! Turret Mode adds turrets to the ammo spaces. Players can commandeer these turrets and, in which case, they will wound you whenever you move through that space! Controlling the most turrets at the end of the game is, as usual, worth end game bonus points. Both of these modes quite thoroughly mix up your strategies as you play without disrupting the core experience.

Adrenaline 5 player

Adrenaline really is a triumph of a game, almost a case study in how to utilise classically bland Euro game mechanics like area control and cube management within an exciting setting to create a completely unique experience. And not just a unique experience, but one that is all the better for underpinning the action with those mechanics. They are enough to keep you thinking but never enough to bog the game down. You’re into the action straight away and once you get a feel for the game, turns can whip around at an appropriately frenetic pace. This one is absolutely recommended! Now, pass me that grenade launcher, I’ve got friends to shoot.

 

Rating: Explosive!

 

Our copy of Adrenaline was provided for review by the publishers, Czech Games Edition.

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