Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day Critic Reviews

Brain Age 2 is a no-brainer. If you liked the original, you should be smart enough to figure out that this is an excellent sequel.

More Brain Training is a game that has great lasting appeal. It might not take you more than a couple of weeks to unlock everything, but once that's done, the lifespan of the game continues with improving your brain age, beating your high scores on the challenges and completing the Sudoku puzzles.

All things said and done, Brain Age 2 is a very good sequel to an already entertaining title.

An interesting and entertaining way to spend 30 minutes a day, lavished with as much charm and consideration as Nintendo has ever been able to afford.

Brain Age 2 uses the same formula from the first game with some different variables thrown in. Your opinion of the original Brain Age will have to sort out whether that’s a good or bad thing.

The Sudoku mini-game is worth the entire game itself and will provide many hours of fun.

The challenges included are great, the more full-featured games are excellent and the multiplayer games are a must play if you have friends with handhelds.

Some annoying quirks remain, but the all new tasks and fun multiplayer modes keeps More Brain Training from Dr Kawashima: How Old Is Your Brain? top of the class.

If you’ve played the first Brain Age title (and according to statistics, if you own a DS you’re about 90% likely to have done so), enjoyed it, but have since grown bored of it, then it’s a no-brainer that Brain Age 2 is the perfect solution to get your prefrontal cortex running smoothly once more.

Too similar to the original to unreservedly recommend, but still excellent. It'll sell well.

With the exception of Sudoku, every brain challenge in this sequel is fresh, and even if you played the first game to death there's a lot more mind-building challenges here, many of which are a lot more fun and addictive than the ones in last year's series premiere.

In many ways, Brain Age has become the ideal videogame gateway drug. The games are accessible to anyone, don't require any special physical dexterity or experience, and feature a regular reward system in their daily measurement of your brain age.

It's the perfect counter to the allegation that video games all rot your brain, and a tight, carefully designed experience to boot.

The wonky voice and touch screen recognition annoys us, but we always give Brain Age 2 another chance, probably because we buy Nintendo's line that it makes us smarter.

Brain Age 2 fixes some old problems (you'll no longer shout words over and over to be understood), but introduces new hiccups as well -- good luck learning to write Dr. Kawashima's way without a couple dumb screwups. And a couple words on Dr. Kawashima: The guy is as condescending as ever; clearly, success has gone to his big, fat, disembodied head.

Sure, Brain Age 2 may be more of the same, but if the formula worked the first time, there isn't much reason to change it.

It’s anecdotal, I know, but since I received Brain Age 2 I have played it nearly every day in my attempts to work my Brain Age to the ideal “20” – it’s been an uphill climb though it’s nice not to see “80” show up on a regular basis.

Nice quick bursts of gaming.

It's not a game, but it's still fun to play. Speech and hand writing recognition has few flaws, but otherwise DS's interface is very intuitive.

If a game can make you smarter, or at the very least make you feel like you're getting smarter, maybe our detractors will get with Dr. Kawashima's program and opt for making change and sketching mathematical symbols over tallying curse words and counting sexual acts.