More Brain Exercise

So old and weary are the boys and girls here at Pocket Gamer that we've seen major gaming trends rise and fall like the seasons.

Turn the clock back to 2006 and Brain Training was setting the world alight and hitting the headlines with startling regularity.

The prospect of firing up our brains was seemingly even more attractive than shedding our post-Christmas pounds down the gym, no doubt because positive results were comparatively easier to come by.

Repeat prescription

Four years on and very few of us actually believe that following Dr Kawashima's orders is going to make our brains any younger. Yet there has remained a place for brain training games in the intervening years, simply because many of the tasks involved are entertaining in their own right.

More Brain Exercise, like the rest of Namco's Dr Kawashima series, brings largely the same format to Windows Phone 7, with daily brain training and a random brain age test – both available just once a day – supposedly honing your noggin for just a few minutes of your time.

The games themselves offer the kind of challenge you might expect from Dr Kawashima, each one coming with a description of the part of your brain the activity in question targets.

All of the challenges can be unlocked and undertaken at your leisure, with regular practice – as ever – ensuring your brain age comes tumbling down in no time.

Brain bore

Just how long you keep on playing, however, depends on how engaging the mini-games are in the first place. On this score, even the briefest of runs on More Brain Exercise suggests this is a genre is starting to show its age.

Most of the games offer a spin on staples set up by Nintendo's Brain Training series.

For instance, rather than taking on a set of simple sums and writing in the answer, More Brain Exercise splits the screen in two with a calculation on each side. Your task is far more succinct as a result - tapping the side that offers up the greatest number takes a fraction of the time.

Indeed, the fact that all of the games rely on nothing more than simple, intuitive touches of the screen mean most take very little explanation when compared to those on offer on DS all those years ago.

A photofit round is just as serviceable, with spotting faces you've been shown previously from a line-up of four taking little more than a few moments' thought.

Training the trained

But it's this immediacy that makes More Brain Exercise feel rather tired.

Given that I've not personally taken on a brain training game of any kind for the last three or so years, I might have expected to see my initial brain age – taken before I'd even attempted any training – come in at a sky high figure.

Instead, I was both pleased and alarmed to be told my very first brain age was actually one year younger than my real age.

More Brain Exercise simply feels too familiar. It's almost a mirror image of everything that's gone before, with no spark or creativity to suggest it knows how to move the genre forward.

Very rarely will you feel like you're on the back foot, which means More Brain Exercise will only really push those who have no experience of brain training games full stop – a particularly slight group, given the overwhelming success of Dr Kawashima's line up over the last few years.

The doctored doctor

Even for those who take on More Brain Exercise with a fresh perspective, however, it's hard to ignore the feeling that Namco's latest is something of a rush job.

The whole game looks as if it's been blown up from a Java release, every image and line of text pixelated as if zoomed in, ultimately making the phone's display look positively shabby.

Some of the menu screens, too, seem an awkward fit on the touchscreen, their jerky motion meaning you often press the wrong button altogether.

As such, it's hard to view More Brain Exercise as anything but an authentic, if slightly awkward, summary of the 'brain training years', serving to signify just why they were so popular and, indeed, why such adoration has now waned, in one fell swoop.