Bonjour la classe and welcome to another fascinating piece of consumer journalism as we spend £24.99 to playthrough Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader (out on all major formats, XBox tested) so you don’t have to. The game comes with 6,800+ fully voiced questions it says here, most of which are easy, and you can pay an additional £8.39 for an additional 3,000+ questions if you’re that way inclined which feels generous compared to WWTBAM‘s 2,000 or so. You can turn US-centric questions off, I don’t know what proportion of questions that is.
The game sort-of follows the format of the show, there’s no money ladder (you earn points) and you have to work your way up the grades, answering two questions in each one. Differently to the show you can choose the broad category for each of these questions. The questions are normally triple multiple choice, occasionally true or false and extremely occasionally you’ll have to select a point on a number line or point somewhere on a map. You get a delightful/annoying kid to help at each level each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and you can copy their answer (like on telly), ask the class or swap the question (unlike on telly) if you get stuck. You can use points to buy new desk trinkets and looks. The game ends if you get a question wrong, unless you’re playing in multiplayer in which case you see all eleven questions and the highest score wins.
There are a lot of whizzing set elements. You can skip past all the chatter, but it still feels like it takes ages.
There is no Noel Edmonds.