Wheel of Fortune 2005 Review

Without any competitive element, there's no compelling reason to play Wheel of Fortune 2005.

The thrill of the television show, Wheel of Fortune, is vastly lost when there are no opponents and no prizes. In Wheel of Fortune 2005, you play the classic game against a set number of spins to see how much money you can make filling in the blanks. However, without any competitive element, there's no compelling reason to play it.

No additional players, no fabulous prizes, and no Vanna White make this barely qualify as a Wheel of Fortune game.
No additional players, no fabulous prizes, and no Vanna White make this barely qualify as a Wheel of Fortune game.

The gameplay is identical to the television show, except that you don't play against anyone, and you don't play for anything. You do spin a wheel, and you do try to accrue points based on how many consonants you correctly guess on the board. You do literally collect those points, as well as proceed through two rounds and a final game. However, at the end of it all, you're left with no sense of victory, because the score has very little relevance. Your point score is tallied into a rating--out of five stars--that depends on how well you played each wheel round, with five stars meaning you performed perfectly. However, you can't upload your scores for comparison, nor can you even track your own best scores outside of the star system. Had the game included some kind of competitive element--not even necessarily multiplayer (although that would have been nice as well), but at the very least in-game artificial intelligence--it would have created a lot more depth for a game that gets tiresome fairly quickly.

Since there are no challengers, you dominate the board for the entire round. The way to lose, which happens in cases of severe bad luck, is to guess four incorrect letters, thereby using up all your spins. You can also lose spins if you land on the "Lose a Turn" or "Bankrupt" slots on the wheel. Once a round is lost or won, you proceed to the next round until you've finished the game. The categories, such as phrase, event, and famous people, are taken directly from the show, and there's an added bonus of downloadable content that changes monthly so you can continually encounter new categories and clues.

The Wheel of Fortune presentation of the game is very true to the show, which can be seen notably in the graphical representation of the board and wheel, as well as in the sound effects that represent the buzzers and bells that play throughout the rounds. However, some of the atmospheric details, particularly the menu graphics, look like they were hastily thrown together. Thankfully, the in-game graphics are perfectly sufficient and will remind you of the television show.

While Wheel of Fortune 2005 mimics the play of the famous game show to a certain extent, the lack of competition severely detracts from that play, making it little more than a simple guessing game. In its stripped-down format, this isn't Wheel. It's Hangman with a score.

The Good

  • mimics <i>Wheel of Fortune</i> well
  • downloadable content

The Bad

  • no competition
  • no variety
  • not that fun

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