Big Brain Academy: Brain vs Brain is the first new entry in the Big Brain Academy franchise in over 14 years. The previous title was a Nintendo Wii exclusive and featured numerous modes for players to enjoy both solo and with friends and family.
Now Nintendo Switch users can enjoy more of the franchise’s iconic brain training exercises and mini-games on the go or from the comfort of their own home. While it may not be as iconic as its competitor Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training, Big Brain Academy still delivers some great fun that will engage your brain.
Multiple Mini-Games
Big Brain Academy: Brain vs Brain kicks off with an incredibly basic character creator. Users will create their character and then dive straight into a series of mental exercises which will test your brainpower.
There’s five different categories to choose from with four different activities in each category. The categories on offer are “Identify”, “Memorize”, “Analyze”, “Compute” and “Visualize” and each one is quite self-explanatory as to what to expect from them.
Players will train themselves up in the practice mode solo while getting used to the various mini-games available. Score high enough in each activity and you’ll be awarded a lobe medal with three star Gold Lobe medals being the highest tier available.
The medals are awarded to you by Dr Lobe and there’s quite a lot of satisfaction to be had from scoring well and netting the gold lobe medals after an activity.
Collect enough stars and you’ll level up and unlock new cosmetic items to equip onto your character. It’s rather addictive and trying to get the highest score possible will keep you coming back to challenge activities enhancing the game’s longevity with replayability.
Once you’ve mastered the “Practice” mode, you can then choose to challenge the “Ghost Clash” or “Test” modes where you will be up against player data that’s been recorded online or faced with a series of tests which will determine your “Big Brain Brawn”.
The graph that’s presented to you at the end displays which of the five areas your brain excels in and it’s quite interesting to see how well you can train yourself to complete the challenges which you struggled with previously.
Brain vs Brain
The real enjoyment in Big Brain Academy: Brain vs Brain comes from playing the game multi-player in local co-op mode with friends or family. This effectively turns the game into a real battle of wits and the hilarity that will ensue from trying to beat each other’s scores is some good clean fun.
Unfortunately you cannot directly play against someone else in real time online since the game makes use of ghost player data. This may be a bit of a miss-step but given the niche aspect of this title, this does alleviate the problem of searching for random players to match up against somewhat.
The games on offer in Big Brain Academy: Brain vs Brain range from fairly simple and straightforward to some which are quite dastardly and do make you think.
Getting to grips with each type of mini-game is where a lot of the fun is to be had and once you’ve mastered a particular type of mini-game, you’ll be quite chuffed with yourself for racking up high scores so easily.
Final Verdict
Overall, Big Brain Academy: Brain vs Brain is a great single player and local multi-player collection of mini-games that will make your brain work.
It’s surprisingly fun playing the game in local co-op mode and playing solo while on the go is a perfect way to pass some time while training your brain. If you’re a fan of mini-games that stimulate your brain, Big Brain Academy: Brain vs Brain will appeal to you.
At $30 though (at the time of writing this review), this might be a tough ask so it might be worth waiting for a sale before picking this title up unless you plan to play it locally with friends.
Hopefully future titles expand on the formula and include far more mini-games to play through.
