That Trivia Game PS4 Review

The moment is always heart pounding. Two friends in a match in a trivia game and it is all down to one question. Fingers hover over the buttons, ready to settle the winning score in a blitz of wits. The announcer utters the final question. Fingers twitch. The game is almost over and all players are sweating rivers ready to take it all in one final choice. Some games capture this feeling with the finesse of a multi-flavored gummy bear while others have not done so well. That Trivia Game definitely holds up with some questions and answers that will make some scholars face palm but it definitely has its shortcomings that keep it from being memorable.

That Trivia Game brings the trivia feel to the PS4, allowing for gamers and non-gamers alike to easily pick up and play with no problem at all. The setup is really simple and offers an environment to just get started, even if you are not a gamer. The main menu offers two main options, single player, and multiplayer that holds up to four local slots. There aren’t any options to customize except for people selecting their buzzer sound and avatar but they don’t have any impact, at all. The avatars are just a vehicle for the buzzards as they don’t have any differences in speed or otherwise, even when playing alone against an NPC. Anyone can, literally, pick up a controller and get playing immediately even if they have never heard of a PlayStation but this is a downfall for those veteran trivia seekers, such as me, who will look for something deeper in this kind of game.

The game, however you start off, either multiplayer or single player, consist of four rounds that play relatively the same with the addition of the final and penultimate rounds. The third round is an elimination round where incorrect answers will disappear, a feature that’s inaccessible to players who may be totally blind or with severe limited vision. It can be very difficult to tell what answer has vanished before a fully sighted competitor. The last round proves even harder for visually impaired people because it consists of flashing answers around random spots of the screen and the contestants have to press X when they see the correct answer flash. As someone who’s visually impaired, I wasn’t able to read the answers by myself so I enlisted readers to tell me the answers that flashed on screen. If a totally blind person is playing alone, however, the game is not accessible. Only the questions are read aloud. The answers, nor categories players have to choose at the beginning of rounds, are not read at all. Some questions require visually impaired players to identify pictures. Thankfully, if a player has some vision, the questions and answers, as well as menus, are very easy to read. If you’re someone who can’t read very fast, such as someone with dyslexia, you’ll need some help reading the answers in order to answer the question before the timer runs out.

People who have physical challenges will be able to play That Trivia Game without any issues at all because, in the first three rounds, each answer corresponds to a face button. In the final round, you will only have to press X at the exact moment the correct answer flashes on screen.

That Trivia Game has more than a thousand questions in a wide range of categories that are randomly generated. This means that you can play around 40 games of That Trivia Game without seeing repeating questions but the category selection often repeats per round. On four separate games, playing multiplayer, movies, and TV were an option in every round on every game I hosted and books and literature only appeared once out of all the games. There isn’t a campaign to unlock anything, and, at the time of this writing, there isn’t any DLC available either, which left little incentive for me to play on my own. When I couldn’t group a gaggle of friends together to bring on the knowledge I didn’t want to play this game a lot. While playing alone I found the NPC’s to be really dim witted, even on the simplest questions. There isn’t a way to play online, either, but the developer claims in the PlayStation blog comments that there could be a future version that will allow for online multiplayer, which will be a great addition.

The game is capable of drawing any player into the game show arena but there’s one audience that will miss out on some of the extra bits of information, prohibiting them from fully sinking into the atmosphere. For players who are deaf or hard of hearing the game is marginally accessible. The game isn’t subtitled at all and there are no options to configure, so deaf players are stuck reading the questions and answers. While playing with my deaf friend, and scoring way higher than him, I had to interpret the point changes, and features of all the rounds. If a hard of hearing player were playing alone, they won’t know the subtle differences in the rounds with the exception of the final round which has a radically different play style, as I said before.

That Trivia Game doesn’t have any problems plunking friends together on the same couch with a bag of Cheetos being passed around between rounds. The game draws players into vastly competitive situations, especially when playing with four players because the questions and answers are top notch but there will be some sort of small barrier that some disabled players will encounter. With no motivation to entice players to play on their own, gamers, especially disabled gamers will soon forget this game after the apartment has been cleaned up and everyone goes home. There are trivia games out there that are fully accessible to all disabled players, even the totally blind, such as You Don’t Know Jack. This game doesn’t hold onto the trivia feeling long enough to keep playing. The effort put into the questions and answers is stellar and something that will have people flocking to this game like a tasty cake but, sadly, the cake has no icing, no sprinkles, or even external goodies to make it long lasting. Gamers, including disabled gamers, will find other trivia games that provide more education for their dollar, along with an accessible experience. That Trivia Game could have been a bath of brain benders accessible to everyone but it just isn’t. It could have been, though.