After its debut in the late 90s, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? quickly became one of the most iconic quiz shows with variations of it found all across the world. It has a simple format; if you can answer 15 questions correctly, you walk away with a million quid, dollars, or whatever the local equivalent of it is. Sounds easy, right? But it has proven time and again to be a task the majority cannot quite do.
The latest incarnation of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? as a video game traces its lineage all the way back to the PS1. Since then the quiz show has had games on various consoles, PC, and mobile, and Appeal Studios and Microids have dusted off the familiar format, sprucing it up with a few new twists for 2020.
There’s a few different modes to choose from, starting with the standard solo experience in which you simply answer questions and try to win the million. Before you get into the game you choose an avatar to sit in the contestant seat for you. Each one is voiced to give them a bit of personality, but they all spout similar lines about answers being obvious or having faith. The host, who has a generic American game show host voice and seems to do this weird leg rubbing thing between questions, sits opposite, repeating the same few lines while an invisible audience cheers and claps.
Appeal Games have tried to replicate that game show feel, but it is only there at surface as a big part of the show’s entertainment value is the chat and banter between host and contestants. There is none of that here. Then again, that’s not the reason you are playing this game.
Before going into a game you can choose which question packs to activate, with a minimum of four being required. These sets include Geography, History, Lifestyle, Entertainment at the start. There are a few thousand questions advertised for the game, but a lot of these will be locked behind other packs which you have to grind to unlock. These unlockable packs include things like World Foods, Disney, Superheroes, and Harry Potter. Each pack has a different cost and you have to use the in game currency Neurons to unlock them. Neurons are calculated by how well you do in the game, with a win in solo earning you 1000 Neurons. The cheapest pack World Foods is 1000 Neurons, but they can cost up to 3500 Neurons, so you will need to play quite a lot to unlock every pack.
Once you have chosen your avatar and question sets you take the seat. While playing you do have access to the standard lifelines such as 50/50, Ask The Audience, and Phone A Friend. You can also swap a question for another of equal difficulty. In normal mode there is a timer to answer questions, with a quicker answer giving you more time to answer the final question. When you phone a friend you avatar has a choice of people to call, though outside of knowing their names and relationship to the character you have no idea what their strengths are so you are flying on faith. Sometimes they will be wrong even though they sound 100% confident in their answers. The audience can also be wrong as well, which does happen in real life.
Most of the time the questions do reflect where you are on the money ladder, but you can occasionally get a surprisingly tough question early on around the £200 level. On another occasion, the questions for £16,000 was how many legs does a spider have?
Outside of normal solo play there the Family mode which has been designed to include questions aimed at children. Other multiplayer modes include Co-op where all players have to agree on the same answer, Free for All where everyone answers the question to rack up points, and Taking Turns, which is a bit like an eliminator as each player has their own question and can be knocked out independently.
There is also online multiplayer which, as you can probably guess, is a form of battle royale, starting with 99 players and asking them all the same set of questions until just one player remains. The last person standing can keep going to climb the money ladder to the top. While it promises 99 players, there were only ever a few players active when I played.
