EA’s deal with board game and toy manufacture Hasbro might not have seemed like the best fit for the consumer when ports of Monopoly and the like were promised. Board games through our screens never duplicate the crowded around a board vibe that you get with the originals. On the other hand Trivial Pursuit is your basic intellectual pub quiz crammed into a boardgame and that’s why the game’s jump to console goes smoother.
Straight out of the gate I’ll say that this is one to be enjoyed with friends. Trivial Pursuit does come with one singleplayer mode called clear the board, which is exactly what it sounds like, but even this is better played with a bigger group. Clear the board does come with a few pre-set challenges that you can conquer and you’ll find some life here. The clock that you race against does add pressure and you’ll find your self frustrated at all the ‘playful’ animations the game has. It’s a good mode but it’s more of an auxiliary feature and with it being the only singleplayer mode if you won’t have a group together often, you might want to take a raincheck on this one.
Still the game’s core mode is the Facts & Friends mode. Here everyone shares one puck and players have to compete for as many wedges against each other. Loosely based on the original Trivial Pursuit here you’ll find a complex version that comes complete with minigames , betting and much more to add a bit more excitement in essence of the original. This mode would take too long to explain here due to all the bonus rules and games they’ve added to the original ruleset. Despite this you are still basically answering questions so it’s accessible and easy to jump into. You can’t deny that a ‘Wedge Off’ doesn’t sound intriguing.
Meanwhile if you just want to play some basic Trivial Pursuit then you can in Classic mode. Here you have a bog standard version of Trivial Pursuit that works the way you would expect. There are enough questions present, so we never noticed any repetitive inquiries if we got any. Here you can play locally and like all other modes never online. It’s a shame but it would have been hard to moderate between a genius hiding out in the depths of Xbox Live and someone trolling Wikipedia to cheat their way to any achievements.
The interface for the most part does the job. It doesn’t look brilliant but to it’s credit it doesn’t look horrible either. Our problems come with unskippable over-animated animations, picture based questions and answers on a map. You can’t turn the animations off and in the Clear The Board mode, a timed mode, this becomes an annoyance while the puck pretends it’s a spaceship between turns. The majority of the pictures make sense and are easy to identify but sometimes the small size doesn’t help the sometimes unclear image. Meanwhile the questions where you have to answer on a map, question your geography skills more than your knowledge of the answer.
You could complain about the pop-up menus and lack of SceneIt! controller support but these are just minor grievances. In a similar vain the in-game announcer proves to be a pest with a limited script but he can easily be turned off. But the game does seem to be a bit scattershot with it’s difficulty. Sometimes it will ask you obvious questions were the answer is in the question and the next turn it will ask you the most obscure question about the most minor event. Still for the most part the game is consistently challenging across all three modes.
As of the time of publishing this, there is only one DLC question pack out on the marketplace and that’s currently free. We really can’t wait to see a few more specialist packs. A special pre-order bonus pack featuring video game trivia would be a welcome addition for the rest of us and packs based on TV or music wouldn’t go astray either. It will be interesting to see how well EA support this game post-release.
Trivial Pursuit was surprising because honestly I didn’t expect much. Board games hardly ever work without a lot of retuning and while some modes here have been returned, I had the most fun with plain old Trivial Pursuit. The game’s wide question base made for some entertaining multiplayer matches and it can prove to be most competitive. Board games are ones to dust off once every couple of years while in company but this version Trivial Pursuit won’t need dusting off. Definitely worth picking up if you are looking for some local multiplayer action but the one mode devoted to lonesome runthroughs probably isn’t enough for your buck.
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