More Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain? Review (DS)

As if you weren’t clever enough already

I’ve only known him for 2 minutes, and already me and Dr Kawashima are getting on like a house on fire. He’s taught me the basics about the frontal lobe of the brain, spurred me on to achieve better scores on his challenges and has even revealed that, like me, he has an intolerance to pollen around this time of year. Unfortunately, after attempting to discuss the nuisance of hay fever I realised the DS microphone hasn’t evolved enough to incorporate useless conversations into gameplay, and so I got down to improving my brain age straight away.

More Brain Training is the follow up to 2006 brain boosting cartridge Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training and follows in its father’s footsteps…a lot. It still has the same simple layout as its predecessor. There’s still a treasure trove of sudoku puzzles for players to wade their way through. Dr Kawashima’s head still floats onto the screen like the twisted brain child of David Dickinson and Slimer from Ghostbusters.

It makes pretty much the same impact as the first game

This is in no way a bad thing, however. The basic design of the game is what made it so appealing and accessible in the first place and this instalment will welcome newcomers and veterans alike.

The only real difference (apart from some new dialogue from Kawashima) are the Brain Age Challenges. This time around, the challenges have moved away from answering basic mathematics problems rapidly and have been replaced with puzzles based more around lateral thinking and observation tasks…with some mathematics problems thrown in for the hell of it.

They also seem a lot harder. Even after several playthroughs, the challenges always manage to throw a unforeseeable obstacle in your path in order to stop you achieving a record time.

Take the challenge ‘Correct Change’, for example, where the player must work out how much spare change must be dished out for a paying customer. A simple premise on paper, yet it harbours tons of traps where cockiness often results in failure. ‘Determine The Time’, a challenge where you must…determine the time…from backwards and upside down clocks has the same ‘Just one more try’ formula to it. Unfortunately, some basic memory tasks remain which stand out as incredibly dull when compared to the rest, yet are thankfully outnumbered by entertaining challenges.

Another important factor in the games’ success is that it actually works. After a month of not playing More Brain Training, my performance in the tasks had slowed down horribly and my brain age had increased from ‘Young and fresh’ to ‘Ridiculously old and saggy’. Now, after daily training, my brain is beginning to recapture its youth after the initial worry of it entering the final stages of its life.

With the new challenges, effective intelligence training and tons of sudoku puzzles, More Brain Training is a great sense of deja vu. Those who liked the first will find this a breath of fresh air and will lap this up as a harder and more rewarding challenge. Those who haven’t played the series before, however, will most likely see this as nothing new. Perhaps if this had a more extensive library of challenges and puzzles I would be more inclined to give this a higher score, yet with a certain lack of evolution to it, it makes pretty much the same impact as the first game.