The Amazing Brain Train!

Choo Choo!

Posted 3 years ago By - Marko Djordjevic

With the holidays now out the way, it’s time to get cracking and as such, if you’re a parent, that includes keeping your kids brain’s fresh for back to school. The latest WiiWare title, The Amazing Brain Train! from NinjaBee and Wahoo Studios will certainly help in that regard, even though the challenges quickly get repetitive.

Gameplay

The idea behind The Amazing Brain Train! is to complete quests given to you by various animals across the land. Their requests are typically to take one object to another animal and return with their response. To get around the land, you’ll need to fuel your train with Brain Power, and to get this, you will need to play various games.

There are 15 different games for you to unlock and take part in. The puzzles are broken up into five categories: Memory, Planning, Search, Numbers and Spatial. These are fairly self-explanatory, with each offering a different challenge that ranges from 60 to 90 seconds.

All of the games start off fairly easy but, as you progress, each challenge will get harder until the timer runs out. You are scored at the end of each round and your history of past scores are kept track of.

While the games themselves offer a good workout for the brain, they become quite repetitive after only a short period of time. You will often do the same puzzles a few times during one objective. And on top of that, there is no real correlation between your score in each game and the distance your train travels. In some games I would rack up a really nice, high score only to travel 3 kms. On the other hand, I would do poorly on another and travel the same distance or even further.

There are also some weird decisions as to the route your train takes. In one quest, in what should have been a short trip, the train decided to take the longest possible route instead. As you progress, you unlock additional tracks that open up more animals to interact with but once you’ve unlocked all 15 puzzles, the only remaining incentive to keep playing is unlocking trophies and improving your score in each game.

Graphics and Sound

There isn’t much to discuss in regards to the graphics of The Amazing Brain Train!. The Quest map is fairly generic with your train the only thing that really changes as it travels along the tracks. Even the animations during the games are fairly generic with nothing really of note. There are a few cool games such as the Rotation Riddle, which requires you to pay close attention to the pattern of blocks, but the majority of games that contain animals are all static images.

The game’s music is also repetitive and it won’t take you long before you have to mute your television. The same tunes during the menu and quest screens are forgetable and the animal sound effects in most games fail to stand out.

Value

As stated before, even though the 15 puzzles will challenge you and offer some variety, the repetition will put you in a position where it’s better to play this in short bursts. Thankfully, if you avoid the Quest mode, the Test and Practice modes will satisfy your need to work the brain.

Conclusion

The Amazing Brain Train is a good idea on paper but just doesn’t provide enough substance to keep you playing for prolonged periods of time. With an inability to keep gamers occupied, the repetive nature will only turn younger players off. Had there been either more games to experience, or less focus on simple fetch quests, this would have been a sure-fire hit for youngsters.