Trivial Pursuit

Trivial Pursuit Posted in Trivia on 22 Apr 2009

Reviewed by Steve Litchfield

User’s rating: (8 votes, average: 4.63 out of 5)  Loading ...

Editor’s rating:

You’ll already have seen my five star review of Monopoly, done just perfectly on the iPhone. Trivial Pursuit is done in similar style, with a consummate combination of colour, animation, classic gameplay and perfect timing. As with Monopoly, it significantly improves on the board original by dispensing with the need for physical cards/paper and by eliminating the possibilities of mistakes or cheating.

Diving into the main game is the best introduction to Trivial Pursuits, especially if you’ve played the board game before (and who hasn’t?), referred to here as ‘Classic mode’. You do get to choose the intelligence of your computer opponent, though even on ‘Hard’ you may still find the game a little too easy to win. However, the overall playability of the title doesn’t suffer too much from this, as there’s still the fun of answering thousands of questions, many of which are brand new for this iPhone version, against the clock (with a customisable time-out, thankfully).

Other options include language, whether tutorial ‘hints’ are shown, plus the volume of the sound effects and music. Impressively, there’s full Wi-Fi multiplayer gameplay, though all players do need to have bought Trivial Pursuit – there’s no temporary (Nintendo DS-style) freebie version that gets beamed out of your copy. There’s also provision for ‘Pass and Play’, with your iPhone or iPod Touch being handed around a group of fellow players – this is nice and social, although the size of your device means that it’s not always easy for everyone to see exactly what’s going on.

In addition to the familiar questions, made somewhat easier by having multiple choice answers (the alternative would have been the clumsy and error prone method of typing in answers long-hand), many now have illustrations or even images as answers to choose from. These work especially well and make the game more interesting.

The animations are fun throughout, whether spinning the dice (by dragging your finger across it), winning a ‘wedge’ or when having a random question selected after landing on the central space, as are the sound effects – the production values here are very high. The board zooms in and out smoothly, as needed. Most importantly, and confirming its status as a five star review, Trivial Pursuit is exemplary in the way games are saved when you move to a different application – in fact, you can even have up to four saved games, in each mode, all on the go at the same time. ‘Pursuit’ mode, in case you were wondering, is based on answering longer and longer streaks of questions in order to reach the end of a patterned strip of Trivial Pursuit tiles.

As a well informed adult, you may find Trivial Pursuit a little too easy to win – but you won’t mind at all, being indulged by the slickness and beauty of the game’s interface.