Adrenaline is a game that is at once exactly what it says on the cover and also nothing like what it says on the cover. This is a game that bills itself as a board game version of a first-person shooter.
In some ways, that is exactly what it is. Each turn, you can take two actions to pick up ammo, new weapons, move, and shoot. Each shot damages an opponent. Each shot you take damages you. However, the more damage you get, the more your adrenaline pumps and the more powerful your actions can be. There is a cool variety of weapons, each broken in some way.
However, how damage works is decidely non-first person shooter. Yo are in effect engaging in a game of area control, but each of your areas is the other player. This is because of how damage works. You score based on the majority of your damage markers being on your target, so the game is all about timing an dtring to block out your opponents, rather than a run-and-gun style affair. In fact, some of your turns can become quite cerebral.
I personally think that the choice to do this makes this game unique. It would have been simple to do a dice-chucker-type game. Instead, they made a bunch of unique mechanisms based around achieving the goal of making it a more thinking-type game. Although it does play slightly slower than I would like, and I would've liked to see some more variety in power-ups, I think the core gameplay is very interesting and the weapon combinations always make it interesting to play.
3.5 out of 5 hyper waffles.
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