National Geographic Challenge! Reviews

Usually I do not play games that have a small following but with my love of trivia and easy achievement points I decided to give national geographic challenge a try.

This game has six total modes. The first mode is basic trivia based off which region of the world you want to be quized on. This mode can support up to four players and the person with the most points at the end wins.

Adventurer mode is basically a quiz/puzzle based game of risk. The only difference is that your not trying to conquer the world but you trying to get a pre-determined amount of points, each territory has a different point value. The points you need to win are based off of how many players, for example a two player game the goal is 2200 points and for four players it is 1700.

There really is a lack of questions available even though they are different based on the continent your on. After two or three games youve seen most of the questions.

The last multiplayer mode is a puzzle based two player game, the individual who finishes the puzzle first wins.

The final three modes are different puzzles. The different puzzle modes are basic jig-saw, block and sliding puzzle games. I personally do not think this adds anything to the game, if I want to do regular puzzles I would much rather buy them at the store and put them together while watching a good movie.

The achievements are simple but it will take 5-10 hours for completion. The achievements do encourage you to complete everything and play several games of both quiz games. For what the game is the list was pretty good.

At the end of the day the game does the trivia portion of the game well but I think the game would had been more enjoyable if they did not do the puzzles and added more questions. If you have soe friends that love trivia and want to gain knowledge of things throughout the world this game would be a great bargain bin pickup. The only other reason I would recommend this game is if you love earning achievements and have an oppurtunity to rent it for a reletively quick 1000 points.

Not since they cancelled Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego? has this geography nerd been so let down by geography trivia. Its not that I was expecting National Geographic Challenge! to blow me away with innovative gameplay or anything of the sort, it is just that a few adjustments would've made a world of difference.

For starters, no Xbox Live multiplayer, I know I'm writing this review a year post-launch, but c'mon, no online was as unacceptable in 2011 as it is now. Then there's little things like not narrating the questions, which wouldn't be so bad except there's a large graphic in between the questions and answers, which wouldn't be so bad except a lot of the points you receive are based on how fast you answer!

And why the hell is this game so damn British?! Nat Geo isn't a UK company, the developer is, and I don't care that they didn't localise (see what I did there?) to American English, what bothered me was that the questions are heavily tilted towards UK, Canada, and the Commonwealth trivia.

For what its worth, NGC is a really easy source of achievements, I rented it and knocked out most of them in one night. There are some multiplayer achievements, but luckily you can play multiplayer with a single controller. And it you're not much into Geography, not only is the easy mode extremely easy, but only a handful of achievments are score-based.

Unfortunately I didn't encounter some glitchiness unlocking achievements, there was one that I just flat out couldn't unlock despite doing what was needed several times, and some that I had earned didn't unlock right away but I did end up getting them while player other modes.

Bottom line: I like it when crappy games give you easy gamerscore, its the least they can do for sucking, and Nat Geo Challenge should get you an easy 800 or so gamerscore, but this game will disappoint you if you are a geography trivia fan.