This will be a very short review because Big Brain Academy: Brain Vs. Brain is a very short-lived game. You will see everything this game has to offer in about 40-60 minutes. The idea is that you keep coming back to it and training your brain, but it doesn’t offer any special motivation for that comeback when there are barely 20 mini-games / exercises without any variations.
Big Brain Academy originated as a game for the Nintendo DS back in 2005. It once ended up on the Nintendo Wii console and hasn’t been around for the next 14 years. It is now coming to the Switch without much fanfare, as one of Nintendo’s cheaper titles – at a price $29.99. It is a game in which you test your memory, calculation, identification, visualization and analysis skills with a series of tasks.
Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain – Overview Trailer – Nintendo Switch
In one of the mini-calculation games, you have the task of arranging numbers from lowest to highest as quickly as possible. Among other things, you test the memory by entering the memorized sequence in reverse order. You test visualization by guessing objects that cast a shadow, and identification by recognizing as quickly as possible what is in the image that is revealed piece by piece.
All of these tasks are fun and challenging, some less – some more. By completing them, you get a grade and a reward in the form of coins. For every 10 coins you collect, a cosmetic accessory for your avatar is unlocked: a hat, glasses, T-shirts, etc. As I wrote at the beginning, this Big Brain Academy has a total of 20 mini-games / tasks, each lasting one minute. For $29.99, they really had to work harder on diversity because the tasks get bored so quickly.
Neil Patrick Harris & Family – Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain – Nintendo Switch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6Ad8WHfUtI
It could have been a decent amount of tasks if there were some variations in them. For example, in the task of recognizing what is in an image, there are roughly 30 images that are constantly rotating. Animals are always affected in both the first and the second test. The images are always the same, the only thing that changes is the weight, ie the speed at which the image is revealed.
There are cheaper mobile games where the tasks have more variety than those in the Big Brain Academy. And to make matters even sadder, part of the tasks in this game were recycled from a 16-year-old original for the Nintendo DS.
The game offers four modes: exercise, more challenging exercise, testing randomly selected tasks and multiplayer skirmishes. None of these modes have an advancement system. You can only play with the goal of setting a new record and unlocking all 300 cosmetic accessories that don’t matter in any way anyway.
The only part of the Big Brain Academy that deserves praise is the multiplayer. Namely, the game adjusts the difficulty / challenge of the task and its scoring according to the specific age of the player. And it adjusts automatically so that 2-4 players can compete at the same time, each with the appropriate task difficulty.
This is ideal in situations where parents are playing with children. The parent can thus solve tasks with adjusted weight for older age, and children compete on a different score scale, according to their age. You can’t usually find that in other games.
Big Brain Academy is also accessible for the youngest ages because in almost all tasks / mini-games it allows intuitive play using the touch screen. The implementation of touchscreen controls is well done; actually so good that this way of playing is faster than playing with Joy-Con / gamepad. If you want to achieve a better result, play this in handheld mode with touchscreen controls.
In the end, we can conclude that Big Brain Academy is most useful for young players. However, I think that they could get bored the fastest due to the lack of variety and variation. You can see almost everything this game has to offer in the first hours of play. And while the mini-games themselves aren’t bad, though they will get your brain in shape… there are a bunch of mobile apps that offer more content at a lower price than Big Brain Academy: Brain Vs. Brain.
Big Brain Academy: Brain Vs. Brain cost
The price for the Big Brain Academy: Brain Vs. Brain Nintendo Switch game is $29.99.
source: nintendo