Are You Smarter Than A 10 Year Old?

Based on the television quiz show fronted by Noel Edmonds, this game sets out to answer one of the most important questions of our age. Don't get too excited; the question isn't what's the next task for the Cosmos to sort out for Mr. Edmonds? He has a maid to do his washing up these days. Nor is it concerned with the identity of the banker from his other, more successful quiz show. No, the question we're referring to is whether you are, in fact, smarter than a ten year old. Well, are you?

In this mobile conversion, you're required to answer eleven questions correctly in succession, each one being based on the current school curriculum for school ages six to ten. Get one question wrong and it's game over, but to make things easier there are five school kids who can provide assistance in your path to academic glory.

These have generic (and cloyingly bourgeois) names; Jack, Rosie, Robbie, Katie, and Ben, and each has a couple of subjects which they're good at and not so good at. You have to pick one student to provide assistance for each pair of questions. If you make the right selection and have to answer a question on a topic they're good at, a potential lifeline can be thrown to you if you get that question wrong.

The questions aren't so tough though. We answered most of them with ease and without having to glance at the multiple choices on offer (or checking Google), thereby conclusively proving that we are smarter than a 10 year old.

The tricky part however is when you pick a subject that's taught today which wasn't when we were school kids. We're referring to the subject of citizenship, of course. We know nothing of being a good 'citizen', and it's probably too late to learn now.

But even if the questions were a bit more challenging, there aren't that many stored in the game to begin with. This means that, after a few rounds, most of the questions will already be familiar to you, and answering them is a matter of memory and repetition rather than an actual test of knowledge.

The developer has also been pretty stingy with the graphics and sound. The menus and questions are basically a series of colour-coded grids, while the jokes and 'banter' are so limp that you'd struggle to raise a smile even with a gun pressed to your head.

As far as licensed products go then, this one certainly falls into the quick'n'dirty category. Edmonds's chiseled visage doesn't grace the title screen, presumably because the budget didn't stretch far enough to pay for his digital likeness. Or maybe it didn't tally with his notions of cosmic ordering. Who cares? The point is that the connection to the TV show isn't as strong or as obvious as it could have been, which is missing a trick in terms of marketing.

All of which is a bit of a shame, because there is the outline of a good game here. The core concept is pretty strong and it's got legs. If only the range of questions were significantly expanded, or if they'd spent a bit more money on the presentation, then it could've been a long term prospect. As it stands though, this is a short term novelty item you can play and forget before graduating onto bigger and better things.