In a nutshell...
N-Gage gets its own brain training game to test your mental powers to the limit.
What is it good for?
Giving your grey matter a ruddy good workout and sharpening clever skills.
Judgement time…
The more cynical amongst you could level that the plethora of brain training games that have flooded the market is no more than a clever tactic for publishers to show that gaming can be food for the brain and not just mindless fare.
But these cerebral distractions (like the Big Brain Academy and Brain Age on the Nintendo DS) have proved mighty popular with punters of all ages, so Brain Challenge from Gameloft hits the N-Gage platform when the genre is in fine fettle.
There’s no tricky gameplay involved and BC keeps things simple. You get a Training Room to get your brain into gear, coaching you in the disciplines of Logic, Math, Memory and Visual. Difficulty level comes in easy, medium and hard flavours and once you played each game five times, more mini games are unlocked to test you.
During the game you will be praised for your cat-like reactions or chastised for being a slow coach. After each game you’re given a completion percentage and a score.
The Daily Brain Test gives you a workout of all the above areas and calculates your brain capacity after each day. If you’re good you can watch your brain grow from the size of a peanut and your results are plotted on a graph. Of course, budding Einsteins can boast about their genius status by upload their brianiac scores to the N-Gage Arena. Numbskulls might want to avoid posting scores.
After the slick graphics of FIFA 08 and Asphalt 3, Brain Challenge seems undercooked and doesn’t really take advantage of the N-Gage platform’s power. But you soon realise that Brain Challenge is all about the gameplay, so swanky graphics wouldn’t really improve the enjoyment one jot.
Brain Challenge is good clean fun and it cleverly hones your train of thought, powers of recollection and reaction times. Such a simple game is hard to fault, but the lack of multi-player gaming and the £6 price tag are our only real gripes.