Review: Buzz!: Brain Bender

It was bound to happen really wasn’t it? If the DS Brain Trainer can get Nicole Kidman to advertise their game, Sony’s answer was bound to use the best PlayStation mascot to show off their official response to it. Apparently that’s Buzz, the chippy wisecracking quiz show host from the self-titled series, voiced consistently by Jason Donovan. Buzz Brain Bender, gives you a selection of 16 varied but simplistic challenges to test your mental prowess with, three difficulties on each ‘game’ and a load of simplistic objectives to keep your attention and encourage you to return, even if the ‘test’ mode doesn’t.

The catagories span observation, memory, analysis and calculation in an attempt to massage various aspects of brainpower and document your progress. Each category contains four games, which give you 60 seconds to give as many correct answers as possible, and they vary from finding the missing domino to simple mathematical calculations. Sometimes you’ll be asked to quickly count the number of items onscreen, or identify which group of creatures (often moving too) have the most members.

Shall we call them games? Tests? Puzzles?

Fortunately they all start pretty easy and go further to really tax you until you hit the hardest difficulty. Even through each test the difficulty ramps up; one game that shows you a maze and tells you to find which exit leads to the centre gives you larger and more complicated mazes while adding different exits as options for the solution. The games are all designed in a similar scaleable fashion, so you will always find something to test you.

By the sheer nature of intelligence and brainpower however, there will be puzzles that will be your forte while others will frustrate you into ripping your hair out over how to improve your score (measured in kilowatts; literal brain power – maxing out at 500 per test). Some tests do genuinely seem easier though, with the ‘remember the pattern of sounds’ game (essentially that old colour button pushing Simon game) being one of the easiest. As soon as you suss out which order the different icons will appear in, it gives you enough time to work out what order to push them in and it’s simply a case of pushing them as quickly as possible as soon as you are able. Equally, the ‘which pattern of colours fits into this block of colours’ game seems very much more about luck as you’ll doubtlessly answer quicker if the first option you check is correct.

Back to school

Depending on your scores, you’ll earn a star of three grades for each game on each difficulty. You’ll earn a gold star for anything over and including 450/500 on a test, though there’s no real way of seeing how the final number is judged from the number of correct answers against the number of wrong ones, and maxing out at 500 even when you are sure you took too long on one answer doesn’t encourage any further repetition.

The graph of how well you’ve done in the past however stimulates a replay (and I will admit I’ve been tracking my scores daily in this manner), especially for the general ‘Test’ that picks a game from each discipline and a selection of easy to difficult puzzles in each one for a four minute ‘marathon’. Then, by achieving stars in each of the games you’ll unlock a string of 15 challenges that twist things a little bit by giving you a 20 second time limit and time boosts for each correct answer.

Achievement whores take note

If you’re still searching for things to do, there are a series of ‘Boffin Awards’, essentially achievements, that give you some objectives to aim for while you’re starting out at the game. Most of them are manageable with a bit of practice at your weaker tests, and indeed many can be lucked through if you persevere.

Perseverance is both the draw for the game, to see improvement, and also its downfall. I managed gold stars on the majority of tests even on the harder levels, and even the ones that weren’t my strength and I found tricky were overcome eventually by trying over and over again, and rather than my own improvement, I found that I may have just been lucky on some occasions. Naturally the main ‘test’ mode, choosing random mini-games could select for you four that you can get the full 500kw on and remove any need for repetition. Equally, you could just keep trying the test until you get four games that you are particularly good at.

Is it really for me?

Buzz himself is one of those characters that if you can stomach his cheesy presentation you’ll appreciate the branding, but while there’s a pass the PSP around multiplayer mode, there’s little else to keep you coming back when/if you finally get the gold stars on everything. Sure, the games are well designed and map the answers intelligently to the face buttons, working very well with the PSP’s feature set, but it is targeted at the Brain Training followers that have a PSP rather than a DS, so could have done more to make it a daily mental ‘workout’ to keep your brain active.

Sure, using your brain and keeping it active will probably limit and future loss of its use, but it’s hardly going to make you into a genius. Consider it a welcome distraction and some challenging mini games and you’ll enjoy the dip-in dip-out quick gameplay elements and good presentation. It might be a struggle to consider it worth the full £20 RRP however.