Who Wants to be a Millionaire – Trivia App Review
Introduction
Today we will be talking about “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” – Trivia App Review. The game is offered in both the Apple Store and the Google Play store. If you would like to find out more about the game you can find it in the Google store here and the Apple store here.
If participating and winning a game show has been your dream, there are good news for you. Now you can, with the Official Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Trivia Game. Based on the hit game show, now you can show off your game show trivia knowledge and win big!
Owned by Sony, developed by Uken, released in 1999 and taking up 74MB of your disk space “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” is one of the most historic trivia games of all times. TV’s top trending game show is now on your phone and tablet! Test your trivia knowledge, call on the audience, collect your team of experts and win!
How does “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” work?
The contestant must answer 15 multiple-choice questions correctly in a row to win the jackpot. The contestant may quit at any time and keep their earnings. For each question, they are shown the question and four possible answers in advance before deciding whether to play on or not. If they do decide to offer an answer, it must be correct to stay in the game.
If at any stage they answer incorrectly, they fall back to the last “guarantee point” – which is the answer their opponent answered wrong.
At any point, the contestant may use up one (or more) of their three “lifelines”. These are:
- 50:50 – two of the three incorrect answers are removed. Originally, these answers were chosen in advance by the question-setters (and so would invariably be the two you knew it couldn’t be)
- Swap a question – the contestants may decide to ask for a different question to answer.
- Ask the expert – the experts become available as you level up and are city specific, i.e. London, New York etc.
“Who Wants to be a Millionaire” – Graphics
The game loads a bit slow and the app tries to keep you entertained with messages such as: “dimming the lights”, “counting the money” etc. This is odd given that there are no pictures in the questions and the videos are all related to ads. There is no real animations to rate so this would be another minus on the game.
On the flip side, there are endless opportunities to customize your character with accessories, frames and patterns. Of course there is the catch that you need to spend some of your hard earned gems to make this happen. The environment is good enough once you get the game going and you get the atmosphere of a TV show. Sounds, music and pings are not annoying and make up part of the atmosphere.
“Who Wants to be a Millionaire” – Categories
The app does not allow the user to select a category for answering a question. Once your opponent turns up, random categories are drawn and the questions present a good mix of all. The difficulty increases as you go up the money ladder. Though you cannot choose a category the game still counts your success rate on 8 different categories as shown below. Overall the categories are the ones you would find in most trivia apps.
“Who Wants to be a Millionaire” – Cost of playing
Well lets say Sony definitely knows ways to “milk the cow” i.e. the users. The online game store is fully equipped and can offer anything you might need. The game actively encourages you to buy stuff simply by removing all the hints available to you. The pricing policy is consistent with a money making business even if you just go with the offers presented to you.
However, if you just like to stick to playing the free version then all you need to do is watch more videos every time you are prompted. The gems that you have in hand buy very little. Eventually you will find yourself having two options: play with no lifelines or visit the store. The first option ruins your chances for a high prize, the second option will hurt your wallet.
“Who Wants to be a Millionaire” – Educational Quality
The substitution of the popular vote with the “ask the expert” option adds educational quality on the game. You find important historical figures representing various cities that will assist with some of the more niche questions. While this seems to be a long shot, the niche questions usually come up when the prizes start increasing in value. So the expert hint does come at the right time.
Millionaire is based on generic questions like any other Trivia game. You can almost be certain that the first few questions would not be hard to answer, just to keep you engaged. However you get no fancy pictures, no wikipedia info and little time to think about it. Naturally, there is little value in playing the game if you are a child. Also, you will probably forget the right answer a few seconds after the round is finished since you will get distracted by another prompt to spend gems or watch videos.
“Who Wants to be a Millionaire” – Gameplay / Advertisements
Gameplay of Millionaire is very simple, the longer the streak of correct answers you get the more money / gems / mystery boxes you unlock. There is also the ranking motivation to keep you active as you can see yourself moving up the list after every victory. It can get a bit monotonous in that the formatting of the questions is repetitive: there are 4 possible answers and one is right.
The app can get very addictive as the rounds usually finish within minutes and the next game can start almost straight away. This feature makes Millionaire an ideal candidate for binge gaming during your work lunch breaks or when commuting.
A little but of the magic is lost due to the excessive amount of prompts to buy products and the videos to speed up the unlocking of mystery boxes. If you don’t mind spending some money on the game then the advertising bit becomes less of an issue.
Conclusion
“Who wants to be a millionaire?” is one of the competitive type of games with the Head to Head challenges being constant. Whether you are playing against a real person or a bot is not easy to tell as there is no interaction or chat between users. My impression was that my winning percentage was slightly better than the 50% probability you would normally expect on a 2 player game. This suggests the use of bots as opponents.
The game itself is good fun if you are short in time and just need a quick “trivia” fix to pass the time and challenge your brains. Unfortunately, it does not check the knowledge box, if a player is interested in schooling as well as passing time.
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