Ojom Mobile IQ Trainer

Brain training is the sexiest new trend in gaming, and it goes to show just how fickle the world of 'cool' is. You can bet it's still not cool to be the bookish kid working studiously, reading widely and sighing deeply into a book of Keats poetry.

It's pretty clear from the advert featuring Nicole Kidman, the Hollywood face of brain training DS giant Dr Kawashima, that the marketing around the genre is all about a veneer of the intellectual, rather than the whole communing with books 'n' social failure thing that's still seen as something of a drag. Just look at her languishing on that white sofa, so casual that at any moment she might just switch to something else entirely.

No, games like Mobile IQ Trainer aren't really about knowledge at all. Instead, they're about the equivalent of shortening your mental lap times by doing little tasks designed to challenge your memory and reaction times.

There are ten such mini-games to play here, which range from counting the amount of cubes that make up a 3D structure to finding out the next number in a mathematical sequence and remembering a series of shapes.

The main game mode, IQ Training, is where your total progress is logged. Each time you play a mini-game, you're given a certain number of points. Once you've gained enough, you earn a new level, although all this really means is that you'll be dubbed a 'professor' rather than a 'student'.

You're guided through the process by an animated talking computer who tells you why you'll benefit from each of the tasks. He does veer into annoying territory with his wagging finger and looks of an extra from one of those adverts for children's 'toy' computers, but his addition is certainly needed because the presentation is otherwise bland. The colour scheme is all in a grey-ish off-white with a dash of red thrown in, so overall things feel a little sterile.

This effectively diminishes any urge to replay the game, and is further compounded by the linearity of the main Career mode. Together, they ensure the experience isn't really satisfying enough to get you hooked.

It's not that there isn't enough content, though – far from it. Aside from the ten mini-games, there's also a decent version of sudoku included, which offers three difficulty levels and acts as a welcome diversion from the main game.

Back to that, however, and we should point out that in addition to Career there's also a pass-the-handset Tournament option for up to (a very ambitious) 16 players, a Quick Play offering and a Challenge mode which ups the amount of time a game is played, from around a minute to five minutes.

Most of the mini-games work fairly well, too, although there are blips. The 'shape memorising' game, for instance, is far too hard, playing like a sped up Generation Game prize conveyor belt but without the recogniseable objects.

So really, you're getting a fair amount for your money in Mobile IQ Trainer, but there just isn't enough of a sense of progression in the main mode to make it one of the better brain training games available for mobile.

Apart from the the reasonably attractive sudoku, the game would have benefited from as simple an improvement as a little extra visual polish – a case, yet again, of beauty and the geek inhabiting opposite sides of the spectrum.