Trivial Pursuit Live! 2 review (PS4)

When you think Ubisoft, you probably think of franchises like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, but the company also has a long history of digital board game adaptations. Their latest endeavor is Trivial Pursuit Live! 2, a sequel to the game that originally appeared on the PS3 and Xbox 360 back in 2014. It’s available for all major systems – we took it for a few rounds on a PlayStation 4.

About a decade ago, Ubisoft pushed their board game adaptations in a big way when they licensed Hasbro’s titles and came out with Hasbro Family Fun Pack and Hasbro Game Night – bundles of classic Hasbro games tweaked somewhat for videogame use. In recent years, they’ve continued supporting this niche, and have even branched out to game show like Family Feud. Our most recent review of a board game adaptation was Monopoly Madness, which took a rather liberal approach to the classic game of Monopoly.

We bring this up for a reason, because Trivial Pursuit Live! 2 feels more like a quiz game with a Trivial Pursuit aesthetic than a digital recreation of the board game. Which makes sense in a way, because it’s hard for a computer to judge if you’re close enough with an open question that you could answer in a slightly different way than what’s on the card. So that’s a yes on pie pieces, but a no on conjuring up an unlikely answer out of thin air.

You can play Trivial Pursuit Live! 2 with up to four players locally, or more if you decide to make teams. You’ll then take part in a game show formula that even comes with a fully voiced host and is broken up into several rounds. And where Trivial Pursuit is normally a straight ‘question and answer’ formula, this game mixes things up with a variety of trivia-based gameplay modes. Sometimes there are several correct answers and you have to select as many as possible, and in other cases you need to be faster than your opponent in order to score points.

The variety is nice, and playing the long version of the game shows (which is five rounds) doesn’t feel like a drag because of it. Some of the questions can induce this though, especially when you get a number of questions in a row which seem to be too obscure for someone in your part of the world to know – which is a problem with many globally launched trivia games. You can make things a bit easier by selecting ‘family questions’ though, which eliminated some of the more obscure trivia but gives trivia fans less of an opportunity to excel as well.

Trivial Pursuit Live! 2 plays like a trivia game show, but does feature a user interface and question categories that directly relate to the classic board game. If that’s your preferred format, however, then this won’t be what you’re looking for – despite the name. If you enjoy trivia games in general, then this is a solid choice, aided by decent production values and the ability to test your knowledge online against others on evenings where a party game setting at home isn’t an option.

Score: 7.0/10