Sky Sports Quiz Challenge

Before the arrival of cable, satellite TV, and blanket coverage sport, our dads had Grandstand to get their sporting fix. It was the highlight of a man's Saturday, the length and breadth of the country.

Nowadays of course that same need is met by Sky Sports' stable of channels, not to mention Sky Sports News, with the almost machine gun-like, statistic-spouting, ice-cool anchor man, Jeff Stelling.

Sky Sports News is hugely popular, and Stelling has become something of a cult figure – so much so that there's now a fan group on Facebook dedicated to preaching the gospel that every man already knows: Watching Sky Sports News is a legitimate pastime.

Player One has spotted the mass appeal and created a sports quiz game under the Sky Sports brand, fronted by Mr Stelling. And, although not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, we feel it falls just a bit short.

In a nutshell, the object of Sky Sports Quiz Challenge is to beat your rivals through the main rounds, with a few bonus games sprinkled in for good measure.

The main rounds consist of multiple choice questions on ten different themes, such as Mixed Bag, Odd One Out and World Championships, to name a few. These range across all sorts of sports, from football, boxing, rugby, golf and snooker.

You simply have to select your answer from the four options provided before the time runs out. You obviously score more the quicker you can answer and if you can string together a few consecutive correct answers you get even more points.

The Time Out rounds, meanwhile, are designed to give you a break from the questions and equate to a simple matching pairs game of icons that depict a certain sport, hidden behind squares on a 4x5 grid. And their inclusion is certainly welcome because we found some of the questions in Sky Sports Quiz Challenge to be pretty tough.

So only genuine sports aficionados need apply, which is an issue. Another is that sometimes the questions are overly long to read, which puts the time for you to answer the question at a premium.

But don't switch off yet because Sky Sports Quiz Challenge does comes into its own a little bit more when played in multiplayer mode. Here, two to four human opponents can take part thanks to the traditional pass-the-handset method. Multiplayer events can get quite intense and have the excitement that the main-game mode lacks. Cleverly, the developer has also left out the Time Out bonus rounds to further keep the momentum going, meaning it's all about raw sports knowledge.

As you might expect from the licence, things look good, too. Graphically, the Sky Sports branding is in prominent display and the well-designed menus are colourful and don't clutter the ample screen. Clearly, some effort has been put into the presentation, with some pleasing screen fades when you switch from screen to screen. There's also some good use of music throughout, giving it a polished quiz-game feel.

What would have added to the experience significantly, though, would have been the presence of picture-based questions, using either photos or perhaps drawn icons. Their omission is something of a missed opportunity we feel.

Ultimately, Sky Sports Quiz Challenge looks nice, but its over-reliance on long text-based questions, and by extension issues with the timer, means it hasn't quite got the excitement and fun-factor to be a real world champion in its field.