Ruddy hell, you’re big headed…
Since the 2006 release of Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training on the DS, a lot of game developers have found that they can make a hell of a lot of money from showing us that a game console can make us idiotic mugs into a bunch of clever clogs, simply by repeating simple and sometime peculiar tasks.
It’s definitely worked. We’re loving that the one thing that was supposedly rotting our brains away was now teaching us how to answer simple arithmetic problems at the speed of light. But the ghostly apparition of Dr Kawashima’s floating head combined with the force of maths wasn’t really reaching out to the kids.
So Big Brain Academy hops onto the self-education band wagon, hoping to give a more family friendly alternative to racking our brains. Right from the beginning, we’re greeted by pastel colours and high pitched dotty sounds that can only really be likened to a Saturday morning cartoon, but in no way annoying to the average grumpy, coffee guzzling older human being.
After enrolling your Mii into the academy, you are greeted by your mentor for the game. Dr Lobe, a character
Suddenly you want to repeat every challenge, train yourself up, even if it only means that your brain weight goes up by 7 grams.
who looks like some sort of deformed Jelly Baby, only seems to exist to 1) Patronise you and 2) Brag about how intelligent he is and never actually prove it. This is somewhat less fun, as he will stroke his ego in extensive monologues when you just want to get on with the game.
But enough of that egotistical blob of a man. The game assesses how big your brain is through 5 different categories; Identify, Memorize, Analyze, Compute and Visualize. Once completing a task from each one of the 5 categories (Ranging from bursting numbered balloons in numerical order 
to finding animals in the dark…), Dr Lobe brags for a bit longer before weighing your brain. Obviously the heavier the better (unless by some dark twist of fate they uncover a tumour) and are put into a neat pie chart, which are then transferred into a graph. If there was a game to flog Microsoft Excel, this would be it.
Once you’ve done that… that’s it really. You can train yourself in each task in order to gain some medals and you can weigh your brain a couple more times, but that’s about it. Play this alone and you’ll be bitterly disappointed, and should have stuck with Kawashima.
Add a few humans into the mix however, and the game suddenly shines. Once others start adding their brain weights to the graph, the game takes a more competitive edge. Suddenly you want to repeat every challenge, train yourself up, even if it only 
means that your brain weight goes up by 7 grams. All in the name of proving that you’re more intelligent than your family and friends…and the bloody Dr Lobe…
Multi-player is also surprisingly fun. Simple tasks like seeing who can complete the most questions in the fastest time can suddenly become incredibly tense, making the competitive look utterly ridiculous.
Although these are nice features, they’re not really enough for Big Brain Academy to get a respectable score. It has a unique graphical charm to it, it is enjoyable for a bit and the multi-player is nice. If I had to sum it up, it’s the perfect substitute for a family board game. You’ll bring it out once every 4 months, have a laugh and then put it in the loft to become engulfed in dust and mouse droppings.
The Bad: Not a lot of replay value unless with others, Your mentor is a patronising git, Challenges can become more of a test of speed and memory than of overall intelligence
