Einstein's Brain Game

When you realise you've started regarding brain training as a separate genre all on its own you get an idea of just how much the world has changed in the last few years. And yet some things never vary: movie tie-ins are still rubbish, sequels still sell in inverse proportion to the number of complaints levelled at them and publishers still love to copy the savoury taste of the latest gravy train.

Particularly one as ostensibly easy to clone as brain training. Throw in a couple of maths questions and the sort of logic puzzles only usually tolerated by the terminally OAP and most publishers consider it job done. Disney though, of all people, has put in an effort here that surpasses even that of the original Nintendo DS games. Kind of.

The basics of Einstein's Brain Training are wearingly familiar, with 20 games organised into four categories: Math (urgh, five points off for American nomenclature), Memory, Logic and Visual.

Many of the games are direct copies of those from Nintendo counterparts, with the Logic games almost all being swiped from Big Brain Academy. There's the cube counting game, the one where you have to judge weights on a scale and the one where you have to work out follow an animal (or a marble in this case) as it moves through a scaffold-like maze.

Few of the other games are any less plagiaristic, with a variant of the con artist favourite shell game, a version of the counting game from Brain Training (this time with UFOs hiding behind the moon instead of people entering and leaving a house) and some simple calculation puzzles for the maths category.

Even those that aren't copied from Nintendo seem to have been purloined from elsewhere, with a version of '80s electronic classic Simon and an inevitable game of matching pairs. The only one with any sense of its own style is the Mathrix game, where you have to spot the mathematically correct equations as they scroll down like digital rain from The Matrix.

At this point you're probably cursing this as yet another pointless rip-off of an idea that was never terrifically exciting in the first place – and whose success seems to be largely predicated on the fact that old people think it'll stop them going dotty.

However, the extra features Living Mobile has added to Einstein's Brain Training are actually all extremely impressive. Naturally there's the option for Daily Exercise to measure the increasing distance you put between yourself and senility (and a standalone version of sudoku – gotta copy 'em all!) but the game also does a lot that Nintendon't.

There are pass-the-handset and Bluetooth multiplayer modes, but also a weekly Championship option where you get to face four random online opponents. Success here means a place in the global high-score table and a trophy for your mobile's virtual mantelpiece.

However, as welcome as all this is, it faces the rather insurmountable problem that the infrastructure is vastly more interesting than the actual games. You'll barely want to play any of them the first time, let alone the second. So unless you've been living on Mars for the last few years and have never played a brain training game before, you don't need to be a Nobel prize winner to realise Einstein's Brain Training, while fine, is less than indispensable.