Single-Player Emoji Quizzes That Should Have Stayed On Mobile
I’m sure you’ve been sent similar quizzes in the past. Emojis will be used to describe movies, lyrics or football teams, and you have to decipher what they are. I’ve got an uncle who keeps sending me them: perhaps you do too.
It makes sense, then, to gather all those uncle texts into a single game, which is why we have Cinemoji Collection. Dedicated to movies, it thrusts 500 movies at you in emoji form and asks whether you have the Golden Globes to answer them all.
All Aboard The Omnibus
Cinemoji Collection is an omnibus of four games. There’s classic Cinemoji, Cinemoji Oscar, Cinemoji Halloween and Cinemoji Series. You can probably guess the focus of each one.
Cinemoji is your all-rounder, delivering emoji quizzes in genre headings. You pick a category like ‘Animation’ or ‘Westerns’ and then solve five emoji puzzles based on favourite movies from that genre.
Cinemoji Oscar takes a chronological approach to films. It starts in 1929 and then works upwards, one year at a time, one movie at a time. I made the mistake of thinking that it was the Best Picture of each Oscar year (and, as a cine-buff, that would have made things a lot easier) but soon realised that I was wrong. Cinemoji Collection picks one Oscar winner from each year, and that could be Best Visual Effects rather than Best Actor or Actress. We see you, Poseidon Adventure.
Cinemoji Halloween is just a compendium of horror titles, some of which are also in Cinemoji, while Cinemoji Series takes a neat little sidestep into TV series. I surprised myself by being far better at the TV series than any of the others.
We Have Friends Too!
Okay, so some expectation-setting before we move into the questions themselves. Cinemoji Collection is not multiplayer. I mean, it really should be, but it’s not. You can only play on one pad, with one player. Which is a neat segue into the next caveat: you can only play on a game controller. You can’t enter a room code and play on your mobile phone, a la Jackbox. We’ll get into why that’s a pain in a moment.
There are no highscores, no star-rankings or anything like that. Once a question is done, it’s ticked off and you never need to complete it again. That’s all that Cinemoji Collection offers, which is something of a missed opportunity. There’s a version of this game that incorporates these elements, and I can’t help thinking it would sell so much better.
In fact, the vanilla-ness of Cinemoji Collection starts impeding on the joy. It’s actually difficult to tell which questions you have done and which you have skipped. Head into Cinemoji Halloween, and you will get a list of 100 movies and there’s not a tick or cross next to any of them. All you can do is press skip, skip, skip to see which ones are left unanswered.
But the greatest usability frustration is undoubtedly using an Xbox controller for typing in film names. It would be a challenge to make it worse than the current implementation. You have to jab the analogue stick in the direction of letters (not ordered like a keyboard or alphabetically), and watch as the cursor resets back to the top-left letter after each selection. It’s diabolical, and can mean you’re spending a good two minutes trying to type out ‘The Bridges of Madison County’.
That’s when the cursor isn’t getting lost in some unseen menu. It’s entirely possible to lose the UI focus and have to reset the puzzle simply because you can’t drag the cursor back to the letters. Heaven forbid you accidentally open the audio menu, because it’s impossible to get back from.
Smiley Face, Demon Face, Green Upwards Arrow
If Cinemoji Collection wasn’t so flipping awkward to use, it might have had some merit. We can imagine it working perfectly well on a tablet or mobile, for example, which we imagine was where it originated from. Somewhere, in the port to console, some enjoyment got sapped away.
Because the puzzles are pretty good. They waver between the figurative (Star Wars is a star and two guns, for example) and the descriptive, depicting events from the movie. Much of the time, the puzzle is working out which of these two camps it is in. And the difficulty veers from the easy (a shark for Jaws) to the near indecipherable (I’m not sure what’s going on with Cimarron).
If I were to quibble, the inclusion of ONLY the letters from the film’s title does ruin things somewhat. I found myself looking at the letters just as much as the emojis, because I could solve the anagram and determine the film that way. It felt like it was undermining the point of the game: this is Cinemoji Collection after all.
But I started to get the hang of the controls, and the puzzles were good enough that I could rattle through several in sequence. I learned to stop worrying about puzzles I couldn’t solve: Cinemoji Collection is so much better if you don’t get bogged down. Once I was in this state – about an hour in, I might add – I was enjoying myself.
I should caveat that I am a huge movie fan, and I would say that you need to be too. There are lots of very deep cuts here, particularly in the deepest reaches of the Oscar and Halloween collection. If you pop to the cinema once or twice a year, you might want to think twice about picking this up.
A Clever Quizzer, With Big Caveats
Which is an awful lot of caveats for one quiz game. Cinemoji Collection is one player, not multiplayer. It’s controller-only, which makes text input a ball-ache. It’s hardcore in its questions, and has barely any of the basic features that you would expect from a quiz game. BUT the puzzles can be clever, and cine-enthusiasts will get a kick from answering them.
If, after all that, you are still interested, then bravo. You have your gaming fix before Oscar night.
Important Links
A Popcorn-Filled Trivia Challenge – Cinemoji Collection Arrives On Xbox And Play Anywhere – https://www.thexboxhub.com/a-popcorn-filled-trivia-challenge-cinemoji-collection-arrives-on-xbox-and-play-anywhere/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/cinemoji-collection/9PKSQT6BL6JV/0010
