By Ned Jordan
The developers of Trivi.al are obviously intent on cashing in on the
popularity of Zynga's "With Friends" games. They found a gap in Zynga's
portfolio, trivia games, and then did their best to mimic a Zynga game without
attracting a lawsuit. In Trivi.al you compete with friends or random strangers
in a series of trivia contests that take the form of a series of questions
followed by four possible answers. Answer correctly and you'll be awarded points
based on how quickly you answered. Answer incorrectly and you lose points. At
the end of three rounds of questions the points are tallied and the winner is
declared.
The whole interface for the game could be taken straight from a Zynga game '
your active games are tracked in a stacked list on the main screen, games are
paid for with coins that sit at the top of the screen and are doled out on a
timed basis, coins can be used for power-ups during rounds that slow the game
clock or remove two wrong answers from the list, etc. Curiously, though, the
game doesn't list your recently completed games, a major oversight and an odd
thing to leave off of the 'copied from Zynga' list. How can you smack-text with
your rivals if they don't see your current win streak when they launch the game?
In spite of looking to Zynga as a game model, Trivi.al feels like it's not
quite ready for primetime. The power-ups are rather unreliable, and I can't
remember a round in which I successfully used two of them. There are also too
many errors in the questions for a trivia game, from misspellings (Michael
Jordan is one of the all-time greatest basketball players, not Michael Jorden)
to outright incorrect answers. To its credit the game does include a variety of
question types, although there is a heavy weighting towards pop culture
questions and a dearth of sports questions.
I had some fun with the game, but sooner rather than later some problem like
an incorrect answer would pop up and sully the experience. And the lack of a
game history is a major disappointment as I wasn't even sure if I won half the
games that I played. If you're interested in trivia games, download the free
version first and see if the game's bugs and annoyances are too much to bear
before you buy the pay version of the game.
Final Rating: 68%
