Brain Age²: More Training in Minutes a Day!

The Good
If you liked Brain Age, this game is technically good news for you: Brain Age 2 takes the same formula and refreshes it with new games that are once again designed to boggle your brain and train your mental muscles.

Once again, you can exercise your brain with a variety of mini-games that involve arithmetic, music, words, selective hearing, and more. As you keep playing, you unlock more games.

Most games are fairly quick, allowing you to spend anything between 1 and 30 minutes for your daily dose of brain training.

The US version has a Sudoku section thrown in again which is unchanged from the prequel.

The Bad
Yes, Brain Age 2 is in the same vein as Brain Age. That means: The games are a bit too similar. The old arithmetic problem (calculating the result of a simple arithmetic problem) now became sign finder, where you find the sign of a simple arithmetic problem. Time Lapse, where you figure out the amount of time that passed between two analog clocks, became Clock Spin, where you have to tell the time on an analog clock that is rotated or mirrored and barely labeled.

Some games are completely new, like Piano Player, but those are completely unrefined. Piano Player is somewhat a knock-off of the rhythmic game type (such as Dance Dance Revolution) where you have to press a piano key exactly the moment it is playing. However, the execution is horrible - in easy mode, the music stops and waits for you if miss the key, and you only ever lose points if you hit the wrong key (thereby taking the sense of rhythm completely out of the equation). In hard mode, the keys are not labeled anymore and the music doesn't wait for you. Still, the game uses the same retarded logic where hitting a key slightly before it's due is fine, but if you don't hit it in time, it's considered "missed". Without any visual feedback for good measure. Maybe Nintendo should have asked their friends at Konami how to do games like that right.

All the flaws of Brain Age 1 have been faithfully retained. The handwriting recognition has been criticized as being a bit flaky in the first part - and it still is in the second part. Unfortunately, it is even more important now - many mini-games depend on you entering words. To make things more frustrating, those games are timed and the recognition takes over a second to process each character. A simple virtual keyboard would have made things much easier and saved the programmers a lot of work.

Another micro-game that occurs every now and then if multiple profiles are in use has one player draw something and the other players guess what it is. However, the player who has to draw is usually the first one to log in - so if you have a routine in your household regarding who logs in first, that player always ends up being the one having to draw. A simple round-robin algorithm would have addressed this.

My biggest beef of all however is the same flaw that plagued the first installation of Brain Age - while most games have a Normal mode and Hard mode, the high scores are not kept separate. Now keep in mind that Normal and Hard mode are astronomically different - Sign Finder in Normal mode is usually completed in 15-20 seconds, but I dare anyone to complete Hard mode in less than a minute. What's even worse is that Brain Age makes a big deal about your scores, letting you see your progress over the weeks and months and letting you compare your scores to those of your three other contenders. This is all completely and utterly useless if Normal mode and Hard mode scores are mixed.

The Bottom Line
I'm sounding pretty negative here, so I should set this one straight: Brain Age 2 is not a bad game. It's as much fun as the first part, but it missed a lot of opportunities for improvement that could have made the second installment a lot better - and fresher.

As it stands, Brain Age 2 is a rehash of the first part. Different enough to keep people who played the first part busy for a while - but not for long.