There's something about watching nature videos that just sucks you in. Whether it's Planet Earth or a National Geographic African safari, exploring the wilds of nature transports you to a peaceful and primal world apart from digital day-to-day Twitter and Facebook living. I've always been a huge fan of National Geographic. Watching the channel in HD is even more of a treat. So when D3 Publisher released Nat Geo Challenge! Wild Life for the PS3 my interest was instantly piqued. The game is a mix of quizzes, dueling card games and a quest mode that has snippets of Nat Geo video and quick nature facts. The core quiz game is built for group play, featuring a wealth of questions that will delight experienced nature enthusiasts. However, since the game features a very specific knowledge base, as opposed to broad reaching trivia games like Jeopardy, the quest mode finds itself lacking in meaty reference content. Gamers get just under a minute of video, with little information, before being asked several questions. Sometimes it feels more like you're taking a quiz on the Nat Geo cliff notes rather than on the unabridged documentaries.

When you first turn on Nat Geo Challenge! Wild Life, you'll see several nature sights and sounds from video taken around the world. These videos will immediately get you excited for game - perhaps, like me, hoping for some in depth documentary video. Unfortunately, the "in depth" never comes. There are three basic game modes: Quiz Mode, Quest and Stat Attack. Within each mode you will be able to choose one of four Nat Geo series: Amazing Planet, Dangerous Encounters, Aquatic Life and Predators vs. Prey.

The Quiz Mode is just that - a quiz. Gamers can choose from a quiz with 40,60 or 80 questions and compete with up to four players. There's also Mega Quiz that combines questions from each of the four Nat Geo series. The quizzes are set up as multiple-choice questions, where you chose one of four answers. The questions will also have a background image of the animal being referenced to mildly break up the monotony. If you're an expert on wild life, you're golden. If you only enjoy wild life, but don't really have any knowledge on the subject, you will most likely get the majority of questions wrong. It becomes a game of guessing. There are three levels of difficulty, but truthfully if you are not an expert on wild life you will find any difficulty level frustrating after several incorrect answers.

Most gamers will spend their time in the Quest. In this mode, you choose from one of the four Nat Geo series to start your quest. Once you make a selection, the other three series will be locked until you complete the series you selected. So be sure to choose a subject area that is of real interest to you. Once you select a series (I started with Predators vs. Prey), you will be taken to a world map. In the map, you can explore various regions of the world with animals in your subject area. The game tries to keep it diverse so you're not always in Africa or the South American rainforests. Instead of just playing quizzes, you will actually get to see about a minute of actual documentary footage in each region. However, you won't learn much from these videos. Only about thirty-three percent or less of the minute has narrative information. Also, several videos are not in HD, which takes you out of the PS3 experience.

After the video plays, you can jump into a quiz or skim around nine images based on the subject area. If you thought the videos lacked information, the pictures lack even more. The pictures are just pictures. Storing simple text vitals on an animal such as name, indigenous regions and eating habits can go along way. Then the images would be more like flashcards. Instead, they are simply there in case you want to add the photo to your library of images. It just doesn't seem like this game was thought out well enough. It would work better, if D3 and Nat Geo sold the game and a blu-ray documentary set as one package.

The world map features various jigsaw, square and sliding puzzles where gamers must piece together an animal photo. However, these are tedious additions, which lose their novelty quickly. You can also play these from the main menu.

The Stat Attack mode would actually be a decent mini game if it were thought out more. If you've ever played a dueling card game like Yugioh, Magic the Gathering or Pokemon you'll quickly get the gist. Each player has ten animal cards. Each card has four vitals: Attack, Speed, Cunning and Ferocity. The player who is "randomly" selected to go first will take the top card on his or her deck and select one of the card's four vitals to compete with. Then the other player must select one of the top two cards on their deck to compete with, without looking at either card's statistics. It would be fun, if you were allowed to piece together your own deck. However, being given ten random cards, which include non-competitive animals like tiny insects or a Panda bear, is not that entertaining.

Nat Geo Challenge! Wild Life could be a great game, if it did not forget about the mass audience. This isn't like Trivial Pursuit where you can choose from several categories of questions. The game would have been more appealing if it doubled as a tome of information presented in an easily digestible format. Of course, more lengthy narrated video would help, but even just a little text here and there to go with the pictures would have made this game that much better.

Final Grade: C-