Family Feud is among the world's most popular and long-running game shows. Over the years, the game that asks families to guess the answers given by 100 people surveyed has been converted into video game format several times, with varying levels of success. Mobliss' mobile take on the show strips it down to its basic elements and adds competition against other players on the network. The multiple-choice approach to answering questions makes things a little too simple--Family Feud 2.0's online competition results in a pretty addictive little application, but the concept wears thin fast.
You'll start out by creating a login name and password, and entering an optional motto, if you like. Once your account is created, you jump right into the game. All of the players are seeing the same questions at the same time, so a full game consists of three standard rounds and one fast-money round. In a standard round, you're given a question like "name something you'd see on a dollar bill." Then it's up to you to guess the top three answers to that question. You can miss up to three times, but if you get three strikes against you, you don't get any points for that round. The final fast-money round spits three questions at you, and you pick one answer for each question. At the end of each round, you're shown a leaderboard and given some brief Feud-related trivia. The multiple-choice method of answering is a little weird, as oftentimes the game will list two answers that seem to be just slightly different ways of saying the exact same thing.
At the end of a match, the game shows you who the winner is, but ultimately, the winners of each individual round and match don't matter. Since you can jump in at any time and join in, the real stats to watch are your overall score and rank, which determine your position on the game's leaderboard. It takes efficiency into account, so if you have a really high score, but it took you a billion rounds to get there, your overall rank won't be so great. The player volume also seems to be pretty high, with anywhere from 100 to 250 people playing at all hours.
There's an interesting bit of side action happening in Family Feud 2.0, too. People seem to be using their login names and mottos in an attempt to hook up with people. It seems like anywhere from a quarter to half of the player names you'll see are directing "hot girlz" to "send pixxx" to various phone numbers. To better test this out, we created an account named "2wld4u 22f" and watched in horror as text messages from desperate-sounding individuals across the country started to pour in. Very creepy, but nothing that gets in the way of the gameplay.
Graphically, Family Feud 2.0 is clean and very text-focused. Aside from the show's logo, there really aren't any graphics to speak of. The sound side is similarly plain. It's devoid of music, but you'll hear the "ding" noise of answers flipping around on the board, as well as the strike buzzer when you pick the wrong answer. It's hard to ask too much more from this sort of game, but at the same time, the LG VX7000 is definitely capable of better audio and visuals.
As with almost any game that's focused on competing against other players, Family Feud 2.0 can be pretty addictive. But that addiction is short-lived, as the action and competition simply isn't all that exciting. It also doesn't go out of its way to match the show's presentation, so big fans of the show won't necessarily like this one, either.
