Name It! Relentlessly Tests Your Knowledge Of Things That Mean Stuff [Review]

If you fancy yourself an expert on abbreviations, acronyms, and symbols, you might want to have a go at Name It!, a new trivia game that focuses on those three things (known collectively — and somewhat awkwardly — as “AASs”). It’s a pretty niche subject, really, but the game covers a lot of ground, including such disparate topics as Presidential history (“POTUS”) and the term “YOLO,” which stands for “I have failed at life.”

Name It! throws a startling number of questions at you across four rounds. And it’s all great fun until you get tired of it.

The first round of the game has you identifying various AASs. The second has you sorting the ones you identified into appropriate categories. In the third, you answer multiple-choice trivia questions related to the AASs you sorted in the previous round, and in the Lightning Round, you answer true-or-false questions.

If you do well enough on any subject in Round 3, you can unlock new AASs to answer questions about and increase your score even more.

It’s an interesting and fast-paced fun time when you’re first playing it.

And it’s all about the score. You play the game alone, but once you reach the end, you can post your results to social media and challenge your friends to beat you. The game has higher difficulty levels that award more points per question but give you less time to answer them, and if you get on a roll in the multiple-choice section, you can stay there for a while.

That’s one of the problems, actually: By the time I reached the Lightning Round on my playthroughs, I was just ready for the game to be over. You can skip any round at any time, but if you’re going for maximum points, why wouldn’t you stick around? So I did and got slightly burned out before the end.

The other major problem is that while Name It! has hundreds of questions on a variety of topics, it only has two sets (so far; two more are forthcoming) of AASs for you to cover. If you play the same set twice, you’re guaranteed to end up answering the same questions again, and then the game feels like a chore or a test of memory rather than knowledge.

Regardless, Name It! is an interesting and fast-paced fun time when you’re first playing it. Just don’t be too disappointed when the honeymoon ends.

Game Name: : Name It! The Good: Interesting concept, breadth of topics, and plenty of questions. The Bad: Can get a bit old; very high risk of seeing the same questions again. The Verdict It’s a cool idea and well-executed, but it can bog you down before too long. Buy from: App Store

[rating=game4]