Ever since Brain Age lit Japan's handheld market on fire in 2005, there has been a steady stream of intellectual training games for portable gamers. While the onslaught of copycat titles has been readily available, for better or worse, on the small screens, developers have ignored 360 gamers. Gameloft's entry into the genre was the first of its kind for the iPod, before joining the fray on Nintendo DS months later. Finally, Brain Challenge makes the leap onto a television near you.
Fans of games like Brain Age, or any of the others, will feel right at home right away in Brain Challenge; perhaps even a dose of deja vu with the borrowed weight game. Basic brain tests are broken into five categories, which are also available to train through mini-games. The categories are the usual suspects at this point: math, logic, memory, vision, and focus. The games themselves are nothing revolutionary, but do well at offering gamers challenges throughout, keeping you on your toes with newly unlocked mini-games for at least a week. It does pretty much what gamers have come to expect of the genre, with varying daily tests, training modes, and results tracking.
As with all the successful games in the genre, Brain Challenge does have its own 'hook' that makes it unique. In addition to the fairly typical brain teaser mini-games, the game also offers up 'stress' tests. The concept behind the stress test events is that the game attempts to distract you from your main task, testing your ability to focus. It accomplishes this by either masking portions of the screen with other objects or asking you to multitask with your other hand by performing a separate, simpler task on another portion of the screen. For example, the game might ask you to handle your regular brain tests on the left portion of the screen, while peddling a bicycle-riding animal out of harms way with the right-stick on the right side.
While Brain Challenge does offer a nice variety of tests and training events, it lacks the personality that makes its more popular counterparts work so well. You pick your 'trainer' from an option of a man or a woman, but regardless of your choice, their interaction feels very stale. The electro-jazzy soundtrack is certainly aged and bland, but does the trick to set your mind at ease while trying to fire through questions in a hurry. Graphically, it gets the job done without wowing you; smartly keeping things clean and tidy on-screen. Just about every aspect of the game feels dryly competent.
The small bits daily gameplay truly works better on a handheld system than on your 360, where the game hides behind a few menus. Since you are only likely to play this one under a half an hour at a time, it is easy to get lost in your library of other Arcade titles.
The game's use of Live is hit-and-miss, unfortunately tipping a little heavily in the 'miss' side of things. The game allows up to four players to meet up for a battle of the minds, in either 'ranked' or 'unranked' matches. This is where the problems begin. Attempting to join a 'ranked' match does the typical 'blind' matchmaking, matching you up with similarly 'ranked' players. The problem is that the game does not seem to check the rankings until it has found you a game, leaving you with too many 'your ranking is not close enough' error messages sending you back to the main menu to try again.
The unranked matches are much easier to get started, though they too have issues. Often it will attempt to throw you into a full room, sending you back to the main menu. Worse yet, when you finally get into a room, the game ends for everyone the second one person drops from the match, even if they are not the host; whether in the lobby or in the game itself. The questionable matchmaking and odd game-ending glitch makes playing Brain Challenge online a challenge unto itself.
If you do manage to get a game going, you and your opponents each receive seven color-coded cards. Each color represents a different challenge type. One after another, gamers take turns playing a card. Once played, the gamer has a set amount of time to complete the challenge. If successfully completed in time, the card disappears from your stack, with points rewarded for speed. If not, the card returns to your stack for another attempt at a similarly themed challenge. The first gamer that clears their stack of cards with the most points wins. The game works well, when it works.
Truthfully, Brain Challenge is not the best 'brain enhancing' game on the market, but it is the only one on Xbox Live. Despite its flaws, many of which are correctable with a patch, it does an admirable job of sharpening your mind in an entertaining fashion.
