Android only (right now),
Google Play Store link,
Free to demo, full game unlock £3.50
And so to an app that was off my radar but asked to try out, promising to be an amalgamation of various different formats in one app.
In Gameshow Adventure you are tasked with climbing pyramids (Aztec, Egypt, Vegas), each one with fifteen rooms and in each room a game. These are multi-choice quizzes (with varying rules regarding payoffs), conundrums (anagrams), catchphrases, a bonus wheel, various puzzles and the last room is basically Deal or No Deal for big points. At various points up the pyramid you can go to a shop to spend your winnings on extra lives, passes or to even play an arcade-y game to earn more money. And there’s a bonus game you can play between rooms.
The app certainly looks and sounds great with its crisp graphics and fun sound effects. However the writing needs a bit of work – it rather bombards you with the rules at the start (there are quite a lot of mechanics in play here although they make sense when you start playing) and the various messages could probably do with a snappier edit, especially considering it’s pitched internationally. The questions aren’t greatly interesting to be honest (they’re also designed for international play) and sometimes a bit vague (“which country has the most radio stations?”). The other rounds play well, there seems to be a reasonable amount of variety in the puzzle rounds although nothing massively original (pelmanism, tower of hanoi, Simon etc).
The “gambling” games are arcadey-skill games some of which inspired by arcade classics through the prism of the Going Live phone-in game. These are fine in the main although the game of Frogger I played seemed to have a four minute time limit which is a bit much. A run through a pyramid will take you about 20-25 minutes provided you don’t crash out and lose all your lives.
You can play multiplayer pass and play and everyone gets the same questions and challenges for fairness. It keeps stats and leaderboards.
This would make for a pretty good quiz machine with a few tweaks, it certainly looks and sounds the part. As it is £3.50 for the full game unlock feels a bit steep in the current app climate. However the first pyramid is entirely free to play (with adverts in the shops) and I do think once you know what you’re doing it’s quite fun – I did shell out in the end.
Join us from 7:15pm May 7th as we guide you through yet another LIVE episode of Schlag den Star where two top German celebrities compete against each other for €100,000 under the auspices of the people’s favourite Elton and commentator Frank Buschmann.