Review: Planet Quiz: Learn & Discover (Nintendo Switch)

Do you know where the Lolly Cake comes from? Or how about how long the Irrawaddy River is? New Zealand is the answer to the first, and the Irrawaddy River is 1373.23 miles long. Quick, write these answers in Biro on your hand now, just in case they come up in your next family quiz! These questions and more are what you will face in Planet Quiz: Learn & Discover. Questions about our, well, planet.

Within Planet Quiz, you have four modes: Campaign, Quick Play, Tournament, and Quizpedia. Campaign mode is the first of two single-player modes where you will work through all of the questions that Learn & Discover has to offer. These are broken up by continent, or you can work through all of them via the Earth category. There is also an Oceans mode, available from launch as paid DLC – which is wild. Quick Play is similar to Campaign mode. However, you can customise your round of questions, amending the difficulty and categories. Tournament is the local multiplayer mode of this game. It is essentially Quick Play but with more than one person, resulting in a winner by answering the most correct answers through a points system that gives you more points the quicker you correctly answer them. All questions in all three of these modes are multiple-choice, with the A, B, X, and Y buttons used to select your answer. 

The final mode isn’t playable but instead a source of information. Quizpedia is a hub where all information related to the questions is stored. For example, suppose you want to learn more about a city, continent, mountain, food, animal, lake, etc., that you came across in the other modes; this area will provide additional information and tidbits about that specific thing. 

Outside of the Quizpedia area, there isn’t much to differentiate the other modes. Campaign and Quick Play are virtually the same, the exception that Quick Play gives you access to all questions from the get-go and allows you to amend how many you want firing at you if you only have a quick ten minutes to quiz yourself. Unfortunately, given the lack of variety in the question types, the quiz modes become repetitive very quickly. Meaning you’ll likely be done with this game after a handful of rounds. 

While the Quizpedia area is attractive, it’s incredibly slow to navigate. As you can imagine, there are a lot of cities in the world, so if you want to look up a city that begins with P, there is no quick search option. Instead, you have to start at A and press down until you’re there. And you can’t just hold down the button to get to the city you want. You have to hit the down button to advance, one at a time. This is highly infuriating, and given that the additional information is usually a paragraph or two at most, you might as well just whip your smartphone out and check out the other ‘pedia, Wikipedia. 

Developed and published by naptime.games, which specialise in family-friendly kid-focused games, you can see the intention they have for this to be either played by the younger audience or as a family with younger, inquisitive children about the world. I can’t picture many adults purchasing, sitting down, and playing through this without an already established significant interest in the Earth, animals, culture, etc. 

Along with creating kid-centric games, naptime.games have certainly made the visuals geared towards a wholly accessible, family-friendly service. The fonts and wording are clear and easy to read across all modes, the interface is user-friendly and simplified, and the art style used across the board is handcrafted cartoon visuals. This art style is consistent across all images meaning there are no photographs of the landmarks, animals, foods, etc., mentioned in this quiz. Instead, they’re replaced with cartoony images similar to something you’d find in a school’s textbook. You can also select an avatar to represent yourself from various ethnic backgrounds in quiz modes. 

Planet Quiz: Learn & Discover is aimed at a specific audience and is aware that it’s not going to be topping many peoples wishlist, but if you have a love for all things Earth, animals, and culture, I’m sure you’d be able to have a fairly decent, albeit short, time with this. That said, if you are passionate about those subjects, it’s likely that this may not be very challenging at all, and just confirm what you know. Its three quiz modes are the same and do little outside of this to keep gameplay fresh and exciting after a short burst of rounds. I guess it boils down to the individual, and if you are primarily using your Nintendo Switch for this, I’m sorry, but you’re doing it wrong.