Last year's hit Nintendo DS title Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day received many favorable reviews, and was considered a huge success due to its wide acceptance and low cost to develop. Using the same formula of daily training and brain age checks, Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day continues the series with some new exercises, but will the changes be good your brain, or bad? Click the Read more link below for the full review.

If you've played the original Brain Age, the sequel will feel very similar when navigating the menus, and reading the various directions, but all the activities have been changed. There is still a Sudoku mode that follows the same formula as the original, but all the brain training exercises from the first are gone, replaced with what felt like much harder exercises. Whereas the original had simple math problems, Brain Age 2 has Sign Finder, where you must fill in the necessary mathematical operation to make the formula correct. It's a more challenging task, but is far from the most difficult one you will face.

After several months with the original Brain Age, some flaws began to appear in the various training exercises and tests. For the most part, these have been corrected in Brain Age 2. In the original Brain Age, you were told to read a passage of text, or count to 120 out loud, and click a button when you were done. In Brain Age 2, there are no tests like this, so there's no way to pretend you finished earlier to lower your brain age.

A nice addition to the series of tests is a rhythm exercise that has you playing copyright-free works via an on-screen piano keyboard. My years of piano lessons helped a little with reading the music, but playing was obviously very different. On hard mode, I found it near impossible, as the songs are played faster than usual, and it doesn't pause on each note to let you find it on the keyboard. It feels like it could take a while to master the virtual piano, but that's good for a game that you might play every day for years.

Another welcome addition is a Virus Buster exercise that provides a relaxation alternative to Sudoku. Basically it's the old Nintendo game Dr. Mario, but you use the touchscreen to drag the pill around, and tap the pill to rotate it. I found the controls frustrating at first, but with a little practice I was clearing the viruses out like hot chicken soup.

The good Dr. Kawashima has retooled his Brain Training exercises, and definitely raised the bar for reaching the ideal Brain Age of 20. If you've been playing Brain Age daily for months, you'll find these new exercises much more challenging, and should pick up the game right away. If you got bored with the original, there are some new surprises, but there isn't much to hold your interest longer than the first. And if you've never tried a Brain Training game, you need to consider if you want a real mental challenge from a video game. Brain Age 2 can provide that challenge along with some fun, but for the first timer, the original might be a little less intimidating.

7/10

Related Links:
Brain Age 2 Image Gallery
Review: Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day