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There have been copious trivia games released over the years, with Relentless Software’s surprisingly good Buzz! series perhaps being the most popular among PlayStation fans. The latest title to tackle the quiz genre, That Trivia Game, is exclusive to the PlayStation 4 – and certainly deserves top marks for its highly original name.

The game can be played solo or with friends, but you’re obviously going to get the most entertainment out of the latter option. Whichever way you decide to play, you’ll need to select an avatar to represent you in the game, as well as a costume colour, too. You’ll also be able to give your contestant a name, and select what noise your buzzer makes.

The customisation options don’t run particularly deep, but there’s enough there to allow you to inject a little personality into the game. Buzzer sounds range from a cow’s moo to a big fat splat, and it accentuates the silliness of the game show format. The characters are equally ridiculous, and we found ourselves fighting over who would get to be the pirate.

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It’s just a shame that the actual action is so dull. You’ll compete in four question and answer sessions per match, each of which introduces a slight twist, be it fastest finger first or other permutations. Sadly, the tweaks to the format aren’t enough to keep it interesting, even if there are multiple subjects – such as history, science, animals, music, and television – to test your grey matter.

Worse still, despite the promise of thousands of questions, we started to see repeats after just a handful of games, which basically kills the title’s replayability. Seeing as each match takes about ten minutes to complete regardless of the number of players involved, that means that you're going to feel like you’ve seen everything within at least a couple of hours.

It also doesn’t help that the title doesn’t seem to understand who it’s targeting. The short play sessions and garish visuals – which look like they’ve been pulled out of the PlayStation 2 era – give this product a children’s appearance, but the wording of the questions is far too complex for kids to understand. As a result, it seems to miss all age brackets.

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And if that’s not enough, we found the scoring system to be largely unfair, as it’s quite possible to be the player that answers the most correct questions – and still finish last. While we suppose that this does create the potential for some entertaining squabbles and arguments between friends and family, it does kind of defeat the whole purpose of a quiz game.

Conclusion

That Trivia Game is a poor game show title with very little appeal and even less replay value. Indeed, the title’s few redeeming features are overshadowed by poor presentation and a seriously unfair scoring system. To its credit, there are a large roster of categories to select from, but the amount of questions are limited, meaning that you only need to play a few matches before you’ll start seeing the same conundrums again. We don’t do audio reviews, but if we did, a certain Family Fortunes sound sample would sum up this disappointment quite succinctly.