The Weakest Link Second Edition

There have been many intimidating women throughout history. From Joan Rivers to Mrs McClusky, Margaret Thatcher to Cherie Blair, the dominant woman has graced the annals of history like a footprint in freshly-laid cement.

There is one woman, however, more fearsome, more loathsome and more gruesome than any before her. Her face has been altered to striking effect, and ice cold blood pumps through her veins. We speak, of course, of Anne Robinson.

In case you've not seen her late afternoon show The Weakest Link – maybe you have a proper job – it works as follows. A team of players face several rounds of questions against a ticking clock. Get successive questions right, and each correct answer wins ever more money. Get it wrong though, and you lose all the money the team has won since they last 'banked'. Banking money protects it, but it resets the amount of money won per question, so the team has to build their way back again.

However much money the team has won when the round is up, you're still verbally belittled by Anne. With comments such as "You're the bad apple in my barrel" or "flea brain", she does her best to pull the rug from underneath your feet.

Robinson is really the sole reason for tuning into The Weakest Link, so we hoped we'd bump into her in The Weakest Link Second Edition, which takes the television show and converts it to the even smaller screen.

But in this mobile game version, there's neither sight nor sound of Anne Robinson to be found!

You do get anonymous put-downs, but the venom from the TV show has been watered down, with mediocre responses to your performance.

But this isn't the only gripe we've got with the game. Instead of competing against other players in this suburban circle of hell, you'll probably feel like it's the game that's up against you.

The Weakest Link Second Edition features questions from numerous categories, such as History and Music, where a chain of six correct answers is enough to complete the round. There's only enough time for a couple of incorrect answers before your time runs out though.

The problem is there's just no way to play safely – to be able to bank at a reasonable level and then create another chain of correct answers to build up the required amount of cash before falling foul of the harsh time limit.

You end up making either a clean sweep of the answers or a complete hash of things. Unless you're an egghead or happen to have swallowed the Encyclopaedia Britannica at birth, there thus isn't a great chance of progressing. The humble man or woman, boy or girl, off the everyday streets of Britain, is very likely to struggle.

On the plus side, the menus and question screens are all easy to follow, and the controls are so straightforward that a blindfolded monkey wouldn't have any complaints, or at least none that couldn't be assuaged with a banana.

The Weakest Link Second Edition isn't dreadful by any means. But it is frustrating when you can't progress, and this combined with its failure to replicate the original show's sparkle makes it seem worse than it really is.

Goodbye!

The Weakest Link Second Edition

It isn't quite The Weakest Link, but you might be, as you bang your head against its too-tough questions
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