Should you prepare to be schooled?
Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? is a charmingly humorous quiz game based on the popular TV franchise. Multiple-choice questions, true-or-false challenges, and minigames will test your proficiency in 24 different subjects. Faced with a tough question, you can always rely on your classmates for help. More than 6800 questions on topics like animal sciences, vocabulary, math, and more are delivered by a diverse, fully voiced, and animated cast of characters. Beat each challenge alone or together with family and friends in exciting couch co-op multiplayer gameplay to prove that you are, in fact, smarter than a 5th grader!
Like the TV show, Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? will test your general knowledge with help from school children through categories like vocabulary, math, history and so on. But if you get a single question wrong, you are finished. There is a diverse group of classmates that each have their own specialist subjects, so you can either use them on those for an advantage or just go it alone if you wish to prove you don’t need the assist.
I would advise to check your ego at the door though, I got caught out on a few good questions because I thought I was right and didn’t need help from kids, but damn how wrong I was! We take for granted what we think we know, but in reality, when put on the spot like this, its easy to make mistakes or to think you are smarter than you actually are. You can play the game alone or with friends/family in couch co-op, but there’s no online play which is surprising considering the vast amount of questions here.
We’re talking over 6800 questions in this package, so chances of seeing a repeat question in quick succession are incredibly small, so memorising the answers isn’t really an option unless you have an incredible memory. If there’s any criticism to be had with the game itself, it’s just how long you have to wait between questions as the game acts like the show, so you’ll hear from the host and the schoolkids with quite a bit of pointless dialogue for extra padding. It just drags it out, though you can skip this by holding down the X button, but this too takes far too long.
The visuals are simple but effective. Characters are animated well and there’s a decent diverse cast of kids here, all of which are voiced well overall. The framerate is consistent, and I didn’t come across any bugs during my time with the game.
The Verdict
Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? is a decent quiz game with an impressive amount of questions in its arsenal. Its only downfalls are the lack of online multiplayer and the unnecessary exposition between questions, but ultimately a good challenge of your general knowledge.