Tick Tock Review

The pressure is on. Do you think you know your friends? You'd better hope you do, because in six wrong answers a bomb will go off! Tick Tock is the debut Facebook game from powerhouse developer UbiSoft that puts your relationships to the test. Send and recieve bombs to each other that quiz your Friends List knowledge, and expect a face full of explosion if you don't know your friends as well as you think.

By
Share this
  • Share this on Facebook
  • Share this on Twitter

The pressure is on. Do you think you know your friends? You'd better hope you do, because in six wrong answers a bomb will go off! Tick Tock is the debut Facebook game from powerhouse developer UbiSoft that puts your relationships to the test. Send and recieve bombs to each other that quiz your Friends List knowledge, and expect a face full of explosion if you don't know your friends as well as you think.

Tick Tock is a game that tests how well you know your friends, or at least how well you pay attention to their status updates. The object of the game is to create bombs for your friends to diffuse. To create these bombs you'll need to answer as many questions as you can in 60 seconds. The more questions you answer, the stronger the bomb gets. The questions are simply a series of “Who said?” queries based on the status updates of those on your friends list. You'll be presented with an update and three people who might have said it. It's simple, it's fun, and it's a great way to see how much you really know about your friends.

Once they receive the bombs you've sent your victims will need to answer questions about their friends to diffuse it. The number of questions they'll need to answer is in direct correlation with the number of questions you got right when preparing the bomb (in other words, how strong you made said bomb). Each day you'll be given a certain number of opportunities to get a question wrong. The number of these “lifelines” you receive is based on how many friends you have. For every 20 friends you have, you'll earn another lifeline. When you get a question wrong you can either use a lifeline to continue building/diffusing a bomb, or decline to pack it up early/let it explode.

If you're looking to weed out the stragglers that you haven't spoken to in years but need some motivation, Tick Tock delivers. If your friends list is clogged with people you haven't seen since the third grade or that creepy guy from work that added you and you're too nice to remove, you're going to have a rough time handling delicate explosives. You'll be on the road to building a better bomb in no time if you're familiar with the friends on your list.

Those with a small friends list or with friends who don't update too often are going to find that the questions repeat fairly often. I've been able to keep my friends list clean, sleek, and sitting around 100. Most of my friends update daily, if not multiple times in a day. Despite this we started seeing questions repeated by the third bomb. It doesn't happen all the time, but it's often enough that it definitely takes some of the challenge out of the game. We're not sure how many days back Tick Tock looks when pulling status information, but whatever that number is Ubisoft really needs to think about increasing it. Pulling other information about your friends from their profile like favorite movies or who their spouse is would also help to open up the range of questions offered.

Tick Tock is a great idea and a fun little diversion, but unless your friends are updating constantly you'll likely find that the questions grow stale fast. Having just launched, there's always the chance that we'll see some tweaking down the line. If they can find a way to grow the available number of questions, Ubisoft might just have a social phenomenon on their hands.

The good

    The bad

      50 out of 100
      Jim Squires is the Editor-in-Chief of Gamezebo. Everything you see passes his eyes first, so we like to think of him as "the gatekeeper of cool stuff." He likes good games, great writing, and just can't say no to a hamburger. Also, he is not a bear.