Brain Challenge Review

For some reason, people seem to gravitate to the genre of game colloquially known as "bullshit brain tester" games. Brain Age, Big Brain Academy, Brain Brain Brainy McBrainstein the Brain Brainer, and so on. In all honesty, I like puzzles as much as the next guy, but it really kind of bothers me when these games insist that they can exercise your brain as if it were a muscle. Must make fat people think that they actually ARE getting exercise playing their DS. Just in case Halo nerds felt left out, now they can get their own dose of condescending (more on that later) brain training for only $10.

I am better than you and you're going to LIKE IT, dammit.

Brain Challenge likes to think it's better than it really is. You start out staring at an ugly chick wearing a lab coat named Dr... uh... I forget, she's Dr. Boobsalot or something. It doesn't really matter, because you grow to hate her or her coworker, Dr. Testosterone, in short order. The main modes of play are a "Daily Test" (which you can take as many times as you wish), "Stress Challenge" (which lets you do the game's various puzzles while adding some distraction at the same time, essentially testing how stressed you get before you go blind with rage), and "Training Room", which lets you play the games individually.

Good on paper, annoying in execution.

Daily Test mode, in theory, is a good idea. There's 5 categories of puzzles, each with 4 puzzles, and 1 of each is randomly selected for each category, and you are assigned a score based on what percentage of your brain you're using. The puzzles themselves are, for the most part, well-done and easy to learn, and they really do require some thinking, but they're not MENSA-level puzzles. Where the game falls apart is in how it grades you.

This game is MEAN. I MADE A MATH JOKE

In each of the 20 puzzles, the game keeps track of how difficult it's had to tune up the questions as you got them right. The next time you play a particular puzzle, it puts the starting difficulty at about where you left off, in theory letting you slowly but steadily advance through the many levels of difficulty in the puzzles. The problem with this is that you're assigned a percentage score in each category based on how far you are. Because there are four puzzles, each individual puzzle has very little weight on its own category, and since all five categories are straight averaged together, a consistently bad performance in one category can keep your "brain usage" statistic maddeningly low. In my case, I'm at 80% in 4 categories, but the logic category, for some reason, eludes me, and so my brain usage JUST NOW hit 60% because of how low Logic is. Because five achievements are based on hitting multiples of 20%, this gets frustrating quick.

"You know, you aren't as clever and original as you think you are."

The other thing adding to the frustration level is the doctors themselves. They do a really bad job of imitating Doctor Kawashima from Brain Age, by asking you questions and then reminding you of the answers later, and "encouraging" you. Except instead of "encouraging" you, it's more like "talking down" to you. If you get one of their little trivia questions right, they say something along the lines of "Good job! I expected you to get that!" But if you miss it, all of a sudden Bitchy McBitch says something pretty close to "I'm ashamed of you. You should know better!" I don't play games to get berated, dammit. The same thing applies to your incremental brain score improvement. After the thirtieth time being told that "slow and steady wins the race" or something like that, it really makes you wonder if a dialogue such as "You did a really great job!" was even written into these doctor's vocabularies, because they seem perfectly intent on being entirely indifferent about your progress.

"Let's pimp this game out with an extra set of rims on the hood!" "But who will use those?" "SHHHHH"

There's also a creativity mode, which so far has unlocked a version of Mario Paint that an Atari programmer would've laughed at. That doesn't leave me too enticed to get the other two games in that mode. Achievement-wise, I already mentioned the 5 progress achievements, but there are also a few tied to the online mode. While the online mode itself is confusing at first but a neat idea (Play cards to determine the game you play, beat the game and you don't have to draw a new card), the games take too long to be worth going for, say, the "Win 100 games" achievement. The other issue with online is that no one has ever been on, and I got this game 2 days after it came out. It's been dead FOREVER.

Brain Challenge, in summary, is like the Megalith of the Arcade.

It flaunts its credentials of being a "smart game" around, but has talked itself up so much that it ends up treating you like an idiot, and after a while that just gets flat out frustrating. If you like puzzles, pick up Brain Challenge if you're desperate. Otherwise, steer clear of this unless you've got no self-esteem already.

tl;dr version:

The puzzles are well-done, easy to learn, and the difficulty ramps up smoothly and never gets too hard.
The test mode they're put in, though, is frustratingly scored and infuriatingly judged by annoying doctors.
The doctors are assholes.
Seriously, they need to be murdered immediately.
The online is a neat idea, but no one plays it.
The achievements in general are pretty annoying to get.

Jam it back in, in the dark.