If you’ve ever played a Brain Training-esque game on the Nintendo DS you’ll feel right at home with this one. The 16 mini-games which cover mathematics, reactions, memory and pattern recognition certainly offer enough variety the first few times you play them but really, we’ve seen it all before. Don’t let the childish presentation of the game throw you though because behind the cartoons and the teddy bear mascots (60 of them) you unlock with the “Noodles” earned from playing, lies a fairly challenging game. As you play through the tests and game shows, the game records your progress and lets you know which of your ‘four brain quadrants’ works the hardest. There are also four difficulty settings, with the easiest being 10-year-old territory and the hardest being actually pretty hard.
The game also throws in some multiplayer action (both local and online) allowing you to create custom playlists so you and your friends/family can see whose thinking cap is the largest. Don’t expect to find anyone playing on LIVE though.
However, it’s not all fun and mini-games. The professor for example is extremely annoying. As I write this review with the game sitting on the menu, he is spewing out something about invisible tigers every 10 seconds and throughout the whole game he never really keeps quiet. The background music doesn’t offer any escape either and is probably just as annoying as the Professor’s stereotypical English accent.
I’m not massively impressed with the visual presentation either. Predominantly this is a child’s game, and while that’s fine, I don’t think I know any present day children that wishes to be sat in front of what looks like an old educational game that no-one really liked at the time!
That brings me nicely on to my next little niggle. Encleverment Experiment could easily be classed as a party game, with it’s avatar integration (although they just stand at the side watching you play) and ease of local multiplayer play - but, are there really any families or groups of friends out there that wish to sit down for a spot of mental arithmetic?
At the end of the day, the game is simply not enjoyable and I struggle to see why anyone would find it so. Playing seems more of chore than it is fun and although the game fills a gap in the market (on Xbox anyway), it was probably a gap best left empty.
Encleverment Experiment gets a rather dull 5/10 from me.
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