Jeopardy! review for PS4, Xbox One

Almost sneaking in at just under the wire, I’ve found it: my most disappointing game of 2017.

This, I realize, may sound like hyperbole, in a year where games like Star Wars Battlefront II and Mass Effect Andromeda generated all kinds of negative headlines and disappointed sighs. But, as far as I’m concerned, it’s the absolute truth. I sank more hours into Jeopardy! on PS3 than I could possibly count. My wife — who generally has zero inclination towards video games — actually requested that we play it on multiple occasions. By contrast, this time out, she’d lost all interest in playing about halfway through out first game together. Given that my spouse is exactly the sort of casual player Jeopardy! should, in theory, be appealing to, that should tell you a lot.

And honestly, I don’t blame her in the least. This is the blandest version of Jeopardy! I could possibly imagine. The PS3 version featured Alex Trebek, an audience, and the ability to make your onscreen players dance with happiness and throw their hands up in frustration. This has none of that.

In fact, this doesn’t have much of anything, beyond basic trivia questions. Sure, there’s the basic Jeopardy! structure: answers in the form on a question, the basic Jeopardy-Double Jeopardy-Final Jeopardy structure, Daily Doubles, and so on. But that’s it. There’s no Trebek, no personalized players, no cheering crowds. The previous game made you feel like you were really playing Jeopardy! (or, at least a home version of it); this one just feels like a trivia game with recognizable branding.

Here’s the best way I can describe it: my daily calendar this year has been Jeopardy!-themed. There were new questions every day, it gave dollar values for each question, and at the end of each week I could “wager” my weekly total in a Final Jeopardy! type-question. The experience I got out of that was pretty much the same as what I got playing Jeopardy! on PS4. That’s fine if all you’re after is a bit of trivia; I’m certainly partial to testing my knowledge of random factoids. But if you’re looking for anything like the actual game of Jeopardy!, then keep looking, because you won’t find it here.

Ubisoft provided us with a Jeopardy! PS4 code for review purposes.