A recent arrival to the Windows Store, Max Quiz brings a new trivia game option to both Windows 10 PC and Mobile. The game show-styled trivia game has five categories of questions, three gaming modes, online rankings and more.
The questions range from no-brainers to challenging head-scratchers. We took the Windows Phone version out for a test drive and found it to be a fun way to pass the time and test your knowledge along the way.
Your first order of business when you launch Max Quiz is to create a user profile. This is necessary to compete online, only takes a few minutes to set-up, and is free. Once your profile is established, you can choose between five categories of trivia questions. These categories include:
- Movies and TV
- Sports
- Geek Fun
- General Knowledge
- Science
After you choose your trivia category, the game will transition to a gaming menu with options to play the game, view your rankings, create or join a gaming team, customize your gaming avatar, and customize your player profile. Customizations include your avatar's physical appearance (hair color, eyes, nose, etc.) and clothing. At the start of the game you'll only have basic customization options available; as you move up in experience additional options will become available.
Max Quiz has three gaming modes:
- Practice: Test your knowledge without the pressure of competition
- Championship: Randomly find an opponent to take on
- Challenges: Challenge your friends to a trivia match
Practice games include nine questions, while Championship and Challenges are best-of-three games. Gameplay is regulated by tokens and Max Quiz provides you with four tokens that are automatically replenished over time... a very long time. It doesn't take long to burn through the four tokens and it will take an hour to replenish them.
You do have the option to watch a video ad to replenish one token, or you can open up unlimited matches through an in-app purchase. The smaller package of $0.99 opens up 30 days of unlimited play, while $9.99 gets you a full year of unlimited play.
Gameplay is delivered in game show style with players positioned on a stage with a host reading the questions. Questions are multiple choice and any picture clues will appear on a large screen positioned behind the stage. Each question is timed, while there's also a hint button that can be used once a game to eliminate up to three of the choices.
I did not encounter any delays in finding an opponent for the Championship games, and the game questions offer a nice range of difficulties. You may get a Movie question asking, "Who is the famous actor/director Clint _____?" or a Science question asking, "What structure do plant cells have that animal cells do not? "
I did have a few instances where a trivia question would be about a picture, but the picture would not appear. I wouldn't say this is a deal-breaker of an issue, but one the developer will need to iron out as it could be the deciding factor in winning or losing a game. As you win matches, you will earn experience points that will eventually unlock avatar customization options.
Entertaining Trivia Game but a tad too restrictive
While the graphics were decent and Max Quiz's game show questions were challenging, the biggest issue I had with the game was the token limitations. I'm not a fan of this style of gaming to begin with and Max Quiz doesn't do much to change that opinion.
Four tokens is just not enough and the wait for them to replenish is too long. The option to remove these limits through an in-app purchase is a nice touch, but the time-limited format can be costly. The game needs to either add more tokens, shorten the replenish times or offer the unlimited play option as a one-time purchase.
Max Quiz has seen its fair share of success over on iOS and Android and should have similar success on the Windows Platform. One plus that the game will have being available on all three major platforms is that the player pool is larger to challenge, befriend and create gaming teams from. Overall, Max Quiz is an entertaining trivia game it just needs to loosen the gameplay restrictions.
Download Max Quiz for Windows 10 PC and Mobile
