Brain Challenge 2: Think Again!

Brain training games aren’t as en vogue now as they were this time last year. Nevertheless, the eureka! cries from the mental-arithmetic-as-gaming epiphany are still echoing loudly across the pocket gaming landscape.

Gameloft’s latest release of its homegrown Brain Challenge series, subtitled Think Again!, is a thoughtful and thorough update. Joining the new (and much better suited to the genre) landscape layout is an avatar creation tool. Its presence is never really justified, but it gives a cuddly vibe to the occasionally punishing proceedings.

There’s a functional and broad range of tests, many of which benefit from pleasing 3D visuals. The daily test is the main event, where you complete five exercises split into various obvious categories such as Logic, Math, Vision and so on.

The better you do, the more new kinds of test you unlock, which keeps return visits and the handy Training Room, fresh.

The exercises are varied and don’t fall foul of the temptation to overuse the near endless shapes that the touchscreen affords, keeping mental dexterity firmly on the agenda and benching any unnecessary finger gymnastics. The problem, however, is that progress feels artificial.

Receiving a daily percentage score of how much of your brain you're using, it’s hard to believe on the fifth day that you've genuinely managed to add four per cent to your score every day. What seems more likely is that the game is tuned to make players feel rewarded enough to keep them interested.

What confounds this is that, happily, the tests are not to be sniffed at in terms of difficulty. Though it may seem too easy to score an A+ on some challenges, they are balanced by those that require real concentration. Irksomely, this makes the steadily climbing progress graphs in the Charts section seem all the more implausible.

It doesn’t really stop Brain Challenge 2 from providing a beautifully presented and enjoyable daily mental workout. With an online Leaderboard as well as Gameloft Live support for achievements, it doesn’t take a genius to realise that there’s really very little to complain about here.