In the wake of how much fun I’ve been having with MovieCat!, I’ve been on the hunt for other trivia games to add to my arenal. It was at this point that I stumbled across Go Native! [99¢], which offers an oddly amusing untraditional take on trivia. In Go Native! you play the role of a native trying to, well, fit in with the natives. Fitting in involves answering an onslaught of questions, but instead of needing to answer questions correctly, you’re trying to guess the answer that the majority of other players picked.
This involves a silly thought process that forces you to decide whether the players you’re playing with are going to answer questions seriously or just pick whatever the silliest response is to the question asked. You can play with up to 30 players at once, and questions range from multiple choice, simple yes/no, or even filling in the blank where you’re able to type whatever answer you’d like.
The goal of answering questions correctly is to advance from island to island, collect coconuts, and eventually meet up with the legendary Princess Mango. Different islands have different risks associated to them such as islands with quicksand and questions that need to be answered quickly. There’s also an island where instead of answering the most popular answer, you need to choose the least popular as well as islands that cause you to lose all your coconuts with a wrong answer among others.
It’s a cool premise for a game, and I like the idea of playing in a pool of 30 players online racing to the finish in a crazy popularity-based trivia contest. Unfortunately, there’s no one to play with yet. I’ve only ever seen a few players online, and when I originally thought the game I was in was filling up with active players, I was incredibly disappointed to just see the player list filled with generic bot names.
The developers of Go Native! seem to have fallen in to a similar situation that quite a few games dependent on online players have found themselves in. In order for the game to be fun, there needs to be a large number of people playing online, but without a large number of players playing online, the game isn’t captivating enough to play against bots waiting for other people to show up.
If Go Native! takes off and you can actually participate in 30 player games without issue, I could see it being a really great time. Unfortunately, with so few active players, all that Go Native! seems to have is a whole heap of unrealized potential.
