Mobile Watch: QuizUp

Trivia and quiz games are nothing new to mobile gaming. In fact some of the first apps I came across were pub quiz sims, loaded with an archive of general knowledge questions you’d expect to hear down at your local boozer.

Despite not having much in the way of omniscience, I often lap up these sorts of games, especially when any sort of multiplayer element works its way in. It’s that same mixture of trivia and social interaction that has led to the success of mobile hits such as Song Pop and even Draw Something.

In a way, QuizUp, from international developer Plain Vanilla, feels somewhat like a culmination of the genre so far. If I had to describe it in a nutshell, the game takes over 350 popular topics, stuffs them with questions and publishes them for thousands of players to fight over. As soon as you boot the game up, you’re given a range of options from general subjects such as literature and geography to specific areas like Games of Thrones or the Harry Potter series.

Once you find a topic, you can either go head-to-head with a random opponent or issue challenges to friends. Either way the actual quizzes follow the same structure. Each question has four answers and a timer; select the correct one and you will be given double the remaining time as a score. After several rounds the points continue to accumulate, climaxing with a double score finisher.

It’s fiendishly simple and the fact that matches take little more than a minute makes QuizUp the new addiction for mobile gamers.

Having plenty of content and topics to cycle through is great, though Plain Vanilla has gone one step further. Everything about the app’s presentation – especially on tablets – has a seamless, clean-cut aesthetic. Menus are spaced out nicely with player profiles quickly summarising all the relevant information.

Even the Facebook integration is worth a mention. Personally, I rarely ever link games to my Facebook account, but for QuizUp I honestly couldn’t find a reason not to. In doing so, the game imports the data of all your friends who are playing, making it much easier to play against them. Other little touches such as the way your profile and cover photos are used as a sort of player card give it that extra classy edge.

In terms of longevity, QuizUp is one of those games I keep coming back to, even if it’s just for one or two matches. A particularly good feature is how the game awards XP in each of the individual categories. If you’re a huge fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for instance, you are awarded titles such as “Uruk-Hai” and “Elvenking” upon hitting certain ranks.

If you’re in dire need of a brain teaser, QuizUp is absolutely the game for you. It comes without a single persistent advertisement in sight, it feels flashy and runs perfectly. Even if your exact speciality topic isn’t there, chances are that, over time, it will be.