If you’re a pop culture enthusiast, you’ll love Icon Pop Quiz. The game tests your knowledge of everything from TV shows and movies to celebrities and well-known characters.
Gameplay is simple: You’re presented with a grid of abstract, mod-looking icons, each one meant to symbolize a person or thing. If you think you know the answer, just click the icon and type it in. What do you get if you’re right? Points and a few other things, but mostly bragging rights — isn’t that the best part of being a pop culture wiz anyway?
Click “more” to see whether you’re up to the test.
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How to Play
The overall aesthetic involves bright, solid colors and a very contemporary, abstract style of art. You’ll notice this right away on the home screen, where you can access settings, the leaderboards, special editions and, of course, the game itself.
Categories include famous people, TV shows and films, and characters, plus seasonal events or holidays.
When you click Play you’ll see all the categories you can choose from. The gamemakers have promised additional levels, and maybe even additional categories, in the future, but at least for now, here’s what you’ll see: Famous People; TV & Films; Characters.
There’s also a category called Season’s Box, which at the time of my writing this contained games for the Love Season (romantic comedies and other romantic films) and Holiday Season (holiday and winter movies).
Icons are simplistic, utilizing silhouettes, a few colors, a logo or a single object.
I think you’ll be pretty impressed, as I was, that a person, character or entire movie can be summed up with one simple, square graphic. It could be a person’s silhouette, a certain object or shape, or even just a color scheme, but it’s somehow still enough to get the message across.
Some are easy — a giant ship headed in the direction of an iceberg is practically a no-brainer when it comes to naming the movie that’s being referenced. But would you know which TV show is being represented by just a Swiss army knife pictured on an orange background?
Some icons are easy to identify, while others are more obscure. Trade your tokens for hints.
For every icon you guess correctly, you’ll be awarded 100 tokens. If you enter a wrong guess or misspell the answer, you’ll lower the number of possible tokens you can earn. Tokens are important, because they can be spent on hints when you get stuck.
Hints and Strategy
There are five different ways to get help when a certain icon just has you baffled:
Ask Your Friends — Poll your friends via Facebook and Twitter (costs 0 tokens)
Hint — Gives you a sentence clue related to the answer (200 tokens)
Eliminate Keys — Displays only the letters needed on your keyboard (300 tokens)
Open Letters — Reveals some of the letters of the answer (400 tokens)
Resolve — Gives you the answer (2,000 tokens)
Trade anywhere from 200 to 400 tokens for certain hint types. Help from your friends is free; giving up is 2,000 tokens.
I found the most efficient way to play to be to go through all the first levels that were available to me and answer all the icons I knew immediately. This drove up my number of tokens so that on the second sweep of the levels I could go back to all the icons that had me stumped.
But as you solve a level in Icon Pop Quiz, the game unlocks a new level for you to play, and the game becomes addictive as you jump back and forth between earning tokens like crazy and then blowing all your tokens on hints for the difficult-to-guess icons.
A Few More Things
In my opinion, the sound effects are pretty minimal, but if you want, you can turn them off in Settings. There you can also review how to play, reset the game, view credits and — here’s a fun one — view your statistics, including your total number of attempts, total number correct, total “almosts,” total wrong and the total amount of time the game has stolen you away from your friends, family, work and life in general. (I mean that in the best way possible.)
The game caters to a wide range of ages, with answers relevant to multiple generations. If it’s well-known, it’s fair game.
And oh by the way, there are ads. A lot of them. If you’d like to see them go away, you can fork over $1.99, which will also get you 10,000 tokens. If you don’t mind the ads but just want 10,000 tokens, that’s $0.99. You have the option of unlocking all levels for $3.99 (plus 25,000 tokens), as well as purchasing additional token amounts, topping out at $5.99 for 100,000.
That said, there are free ways to earn tokens, too. In addition to earning them through gameplay, you can also watch some featured ads to earn 300 tokens at a time, or tell your Facebook friends or Twitter followers about Icon Pop Quiz for 2,000 tokens.
Final Thoughts
A few things about this game bothered me. I didn’t like the way I had to backspace all the way to the beginning of my answer if I needed to fix a typo. Also, I resented the fact that I lost points if I used “and” instead of an ampersand.
But those aren’t deal-breakers. I liked the game so much I couldn’t put it down (for exactly one hour and 38 minutes straight, according to my Statistics page). The only reason I stopped playing was because I had to be responsible and write this review. But now that we’ve reached the end here, I’m going right back to it.
Oh, did you figure out the Swiss army knife reference yet? I guess you’ll just have to play to figure it out.