Brain Challenge
Added March 14th, 2008 by Slunks
Brain Challenge is the first mental training game to arrive on the Xbox 360's Arcade. It will have you jumping through hoops of overall intelligence, precision and reflexes by completing short and well-suited puzzles. It's an established genre that's grown over the last few years and Gameloft's latest title lands pretty well on its feet, although it has trouble maintaining balance.
A majority of your time will be spent training for a Daily Test, which when completed boosts your brain use percentage--an overall completion marker (from 0%-100%) that represents how much of your brainpower you use. You'll be studying five different courses: logic, math, visual, focus, and memory. Each subject has its own set of four different puzzling mini-games to play. Initially, you only have the first tier of games available to train with, but the more you play, the more you unlock. The Daily Test will cycle through all five topics, playing the first puzzle from each class. When completed, it will tally your grades, include statistics for each individual class and raise your total percentage depending on how well you did. The next time you decide to run through the test, it will cycle through the next set of puzzles. Once you've completed the fourth tier of puzzles, it will reset to the first and allow you to keep cycling through infinitely. The main goal is to keep training to acquire higher grades, take the Daily Test and raise your overall brain percentage.
The formula is most likely familiar, but it works well. The urge of improvement will haunt a true brainiac and keep you coming back for more. Brain Challenge doesn't go without any flaws, though. An issue that the game suffers is its presentation. The brief tutorials leave more to be desired and will take a few tries to understand what you're supposed to do in certain puzzles. There's also an issue unlocking training sessions. Since you can run through the Daily Test at will, you'll see through all the puzzles fairly quickly. However, many of these will still be locked under the training menu--leaving you a high chance of receiving bad scores on games you cannot practice on. Also, many of the screens outside of the mini-games are bogged by an inconsistent framerate, especially your brain information buddy.
While each course has its own theme of learning, all require a great deal of speed and precision. The faster you provide a correct answer, the higher score you will achieve. This not only shows in single-player, but multiplayer as well, which is available for up to four people, online or off. It takes the game into a new card-driven mode, where each player has a deck of playing cards that represent a class. You play the card then solve the puzzle shown on screen to obtain points and a star. Three stars will reward you with a bonus card which can then be played to give you less cards, increase another player's difficulty and more. When a player can no longer place a card down, the game ends, and whoever has the most points wins. It's a fast-paced battle that ends quickly, but is fun in its own right. There may be a few commonly found issues, and Brain Challenge may start to feel as a training tool more then a game, but what's served for your cranium is a welcome delight. The puzzles are original, difficult and entertaining, with the sight for improvement ever so addicting, making Brain Challenge a greeted addition to Xbox Live's Arcade for a fit eight hundred points.
