Epic Quiz Review – It’s actually pretty Epic

Our rating:

By: Epic Hamster

Version #: 1.3

Date Released: 2013-10-31

Developer: Epic Hamster

Price: 0

User Rating:

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Clap your hands if you like quizzes. Ok, now you have clapped your hands you can keep reading, or press the shiny get from iTunes button. This is just how good Epic Quiz is, in a quiz-quality level. And it’s free to play, so no doubts about getting it. You could always delete it… But you won’t.

The first time I fired Epic Quiz I had just 10% battery left on my iPad, and I was thorn between checking the game or just plugging it to charge and watch TV. Next thing I knew my battery was dead and I had played… a lot. You know how long an iPad battery lasts (don’t worry iPhone users: Epic Quiz is a universal app which works on iPad, iPhone and iPad Mini.)

In Epic Quiz you play Quiz matches. I know, I know, this was pretty much clear. When setting up quiz match, you decide the difficulty level (Easy, Medium or Hard, this controls how much time you have to answer) and the categories of questions you’d like. There are three main category groups, each one with many subcategories:

• Movies

  Subcategories here are: Action, Celebrities, Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Quotes, Romance, Science Fiction and Thriller.

• Sports

  Subcategories here are: American football, Athletes, Baseball, Basketball, Miscellaneous, Olympics, Place of Birth, Rules and Soccer.

• Video Games

  Subcategories here are: Action, Adventure, Miscellaneous, People & Co, Platformers, Quotes, Role Playing Games, Real Time Strategy and eSports.

I find it rather puzzling that there is no Music category, but maybe the developers are working on it for an update. I find the latter category very fun, because it’s very unusual. Knowing who Gabe Newell was, where Samus was a character or who is the current world champion in Counter Strike are odd things to know. And things that appeal a lot of people who can’t quiz themselves to death 🙂

You can select as many (or as few) of these categories as you’d like. To check the overall quality and number of questions, I made an experiment, selecting just soccer (where more or less I can know all answers if they are not country specific) and started to play. I found out that even in such a narrow theme questions took a long time to repeat, and most of the harder ones were still tricky to remember after seeing 2 or 3 times. Also, the quality of the questions was pretty high in this narrow set, covering a good chunk of the international and European soccer scene from the 70s until now.

The game has a set of power-ups that enable you to freeze time, skip a question or show the correct answer, which are purchased with in-game currency. You earn this currency with each succesful game you have: the only in-app purchases are extra packs of tasks.

Occasionally (when on an answering streak for a certain category) you’ll get a task: 9 questions on a specific theme. For example, for soccer you have questions about Real Madrid. You’ll get a coin reward for answering 3, 6 or 9 questions, to allow you to buy more power-ups. Some tasks are in-app purchases (for example, questions about Avatar or about Manchester United.) Getting coins is pretty easy by just playing, but tasks add an edge: the questions are tricky, and if you fail once you are out!

The only thing I’m missing in Epic Quiz is a multiplayer (pass-and-play) mode, where 2 or more people pass the iPad among themselves when they fail, trying to get as many points/questions answered as possible. As the game stands you can do it anyway (skipping the use of powerups) but having it “native” would make it far easier.

In short: Epic Quiz is a very good quiz game, probably the best we’ve seen on iDevices: it’s a surprisingly underdeveloped category. It only lacks native multiplayer, but it’s a very complete game in all other categories.