Mini-review: Trivia Mania - USA-centric and flaky

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Take a heavily USA-centric set of trivia questions, add in an amateurish UI, make it freemium with ads and purchases, throw in a few serious bugs, and the results should be an unholy mess. In fact, there's some merit to Trivia Mania, mainly due to its potential in terms of multi-player action online. Just don't expect too much yet...

From the Store description:

Ok, hold everything, a new fun Trivia Mania Game is here. You will want to play this game. Challenge your general knowledge and see how you do against other game players.

  • Game Play: you are presented with a question and four possible answers – cant decide? You can buy some help. For 10 coins you can ‘Drop Two’ wrong answers. Play the intensity for as long as you like – end and start the quiz anytime.
  • Three Intensities and more than 1000 levels – Each intensity has a time limit – 20 seconds for easy to 10 seconds for expert.
  • Fast paced
  • Leaderboard
  • Use Coins to ‘Drop Two” wrong answers.

Here's Trivia Mania in action, let's hope you're up on your American general knowledge!

Trivia Mania screenshotTrivia Mania screenshot

The interface is amateurish in the extreme, but at least it's clear. The core 'high score' game is still in-app purchase-driven, in that you need to buy coins in order to get quickly into the more difficult question 'intensities', which is your only hope of making it onto the worldwide leaderboard.

Trivia Mania screenshotTrivia Mania screenshot

The time limit per intensity varies - it's 18 seconds on 'Easy', though as around half the questions seem so USA-specific that you might as well not bother if you live anywhere else. Given Windows Phone's worldwide market share versus that in the USA, this is all somewhat unfortunate!

Trivia Mania screenshotTrivia Mania screenshot

In the new 'live' mode, batches of questions are quickfire and, in theory, the same for all players across the world. (right) Alas, critical mass is nowhere to be seen (or maybe the American players come out later in the 24 hour day), since there was only ever me playing in my tests...

Trivia Mania screenshotTrivia Mania screenshot

Ah - this is unforgiveable in a simple game like this. I VERY rarely see serious application errors on Windows Phone and there's no excuse for a trivia game of this ambition.

So not recommended, at least not yet, unless you live in the USA and feel like you can answer all the homegrown questions on presidents, states and sports. You can download this for free here in the Store.

Source / Credit: Windows Phone Store