It’s Quiz Time review for PS4

At first glance, It’s Quiz Time looks a little underwhelming. After all, it’s made by the same team that made the Buzz! quiz games about a decade ago, but it doesn’t seem to have nearly the same level of flair or sense of fun that made that series so well-liked. Everything here seems generic and sterile, from the generic androgynous robot, to the future-themed graphics, all the way to the totally forgettable name.

The more you play It’s Quiz Time, though, the more you realize that, beneath that bland exterior, there’s a game worth checking out.

In part, this is because the actual ?quiz” part of It’s Quiz Time is solid. The game claims to have more than 25,000 questions, and in my time with it, I didn’t see too many (or possibly any) repeats. There’s also a good range of questions types, from the straightforward ?Pick the answer from these X options,” to the more complex (i.e. matching pairs, or competing with other players to identify all the correct answers out of a much larger pool).

Even more importantly than the way you pick out the correct answers are how the questions are presented. For example, rather than giving you a list of movies and asking you to place them in chronological order, it pairs them up and asks you a series of successive questions about which was released first. Similarly, it will relate the questions to the people who are playing the game: rather than asking what year a particular song came out, it will ask players to identify which song came out when one of them was a certain age. While these are only slight variations on the standard quiz formula, it does a good job of making it feel like the game knows who’s playing.

That last sentence hints at how It’s Quiz Time makes players feel more involved than any of its rivals. Whereas games like Knowledge is Power or Jeopardy! felt a little (or, in Jeopardy!’s case, very) impersonal, It’s Quiz Time feels like it’s tailoring its experience to the individuals playing at that moment. That generic androgynous robot (Salli, for the record) turns out to be funny, and is constantly trash-talking and praising players by name. This extends to the app/controller as well, with tailored messages flashing on each player’s screen at the end of every round, giving them text they can share via social media that say how well they did in a particular round (note: I did not do this). Add in the personalized stats at the end of the game, and you can see why It’s Quiz Time is so much better than its competition.

Admittedly, this speaks partly to the fact that we haven’t had a You Don’t Know Jack! on current-gen consoles in a couple of years, and the other contenders for the role have been kind of lacklustre. But It’s Quiz Time is fun enough that it would probably stand out even in a much more crowded field.

Vision Games provided us with an It’s Quiz Time PS4 code for review purposes.