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| Brain School by Mastersoft Mobile Solutions |
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Round two of "Games that make you go huh?" takes us to the realm of Brain School. Just like most of the other brain games, Brain School claims to help make your brain "function at its full potential". And, it claims to do so in a fun manner. Well, I don't know if the game's made me any smarter or not, as that would be a monumental task for any program, but the game sure is fun!
As you would expect from the title, Brain School uses the idea of education as a backdrop. There are four years you must graduate from, each year consisting of 5 different puzzles, and each puzzle having five different levels. To be able to graduate a particular year you must get an A+ in a certain number of puzzles. Then you must complete an exam to actually unlock the puzzles for the next year. The combination of puzzles you complete to advance to the next level is entirely up to you. You could finish all five levels of puzzle one and never play puzzle two in year one, and still be able to advance to year two. While you may be tempted to do that at times because of puzzles that don't sound or look interesting, I highly suggest you give every puzzle a try. You'll probably be surprised at what you find interesting that you didn't think you'd like.
There are certainly a nice variety of puzzles in Brain School. Year one has some basic training games such as "Magic Hats", where you try and figure out which hat the ball is under, and "Simple Sums", where you have to provide the missing number of a 3 number equation. In year two they step it up a notch, with offerings such as "Just Times Tables" (I'm sure you've figured this one out), and Twins, which is like memory but requires you to find all the matches in a limited number of moves. Once you advance to year three you get challenges like School Bus, where you have to determine at the end of the route how many kids are still on the bus, and "Number Patterns", where you have to find the next number in a sequence. Finally, when you arrive at year four you're treated to some world class favorites, like Sudoku and Kakuro. On the whole the games were very nicely laid out and easy to understand. The only issue I had here was that some of the games could have used more feedback. For example, in Twins it would have been nice to know how many moves you've already made.
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In addition to the individual games there is an exam for each year. The exam is comprised of a series of questions from each of the games that lends itself towards being timed. You have so many minutes to get a certain number of questions right, and you are allowed three misses before the exam is over. My main problem with the exam is that you don't have any idea how many questions you've answered. If I knew I wasn't where I needed to be at a certain time, it might give me some incentive to step up the pace a bit.
There are several different ways of measuring your progress in the game. For each of the four years, you can see the highest grade you've received for a particular puzzle / level combination on the puzzle selection screen. From the menu you can retrieve a variety of graphs that show you how you are doing. For each game "year" you can view a graph showing your final exam results for that year. You can also display a graph that charts all 4 years together. You have a score that is based off of the grades you've earned on each puzzle you've played, and you can view the breakdown of this score either by grade or by level of difficulty of puzzle. You can also view a summary of scores by class member (you can have up to ten "classmates" - or player profiles - at a time), as well as the highest score each class member has received on each test. I'm not much into all the statistics like that, but it's neat to have in case you are interested.
Much like most other games of this genre, the graphics are good enough but nothing spectacular. Unlike most other games of this type, there weren't really any games where the graphics stood out. While not necessary for a puzzle game, a little more flash might have been nice. The other thing that was a bit distracting visually was the fact that the game was "windowed" and used the standard application menus for navigation. Again, I realize this might have been the most efficient way to write the game, but when you're used to games having nice graphical interfaces, this seemed a bit sub-standard.
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The sound effects are pretty decent, but again nothing special. I do like the laughing children sound that's played when the game first loads up. It's a nice reminder that Brain School is supposed to be fun, and not just learning software. There are also nice little touches like the applause you receive when you score an A+ on a puzzle. As for music, there is none during the individual puzzles, but a nice piano piece plays while you are sifting through menus or selecting a puzzle to play. It would have been nice to have a volume control on the music, because in order to hear it I pretty much had to crank my PPC volume up to the max, but that's a minor problem.
While not a particularly strong fan of this type of game, I did find Brain School a nicely crafted piece of software with a diverse and thoughtful set of puzzles to play. The school atmosphere both makes sense and holds the parts of the game together well. A little more flash in the audio and visual departments would have made Brain School seemed more polished, but if you're into flexing your cranial muscles you can't go wrong here.
Overall Score: 7/10
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