Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain (Switch)

Getting the right answers on a test makes you feel smart, getting the right answers when someone else didn’t makes you feel even smarter, but one problem with that is if you’re playing against someone in multiplayer you probably won’t enjoy making the other person feel less intelligent. Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain concocts a solid solution to this, anonymizing its online play but also making it so you’re not in direct live competition with another player.

Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain has a set of 20 mental exercises you are meant to complete on your own, these taking the shapes of timed minigames meant to test different types of intelligence. None of these are dry trivia challenges and so long as you can do things like elementary school math and can read an analogue clock you’ll never be barred from completing these tasks, the challenge often not so much in what you know but how fast you can figure out the right answer to a quick question. These minigames do mostly fit into two camps, ones about quickly figuring out the visuals on screen and providing the right answers such as a game with a group of scales where you need to figure out the heaviest object and ones with a focus on memory like the calculator that briefly flashes a number sequence you need to type, reaction time considered just as important as picking the right answer. After playing some of the exercises in single-player though, the game begins to build up a record of how you played those games and sends them anonymously to other people playing online, the only information about you being things like your age, the closest approximation of your job in a small list, and a quote you choose from some pre-made options. In this online mode you compete against a player’s ghost data, their reaction times and answer choices saved and playing out without any involvement or actual presence from the real player it represents. Online games thus go very quickly and have zero issues with lagging or disconnects, both sides of the selected minigame playing different puzzles until someone earns enough points to be declared the superior brain and earning or losing points in the rankings.

Brain vs. Brain is a pretty addicting way to extend this game’s life and there’s even a pretty simple reward system in place to keep you coming back, new introduction quotes unlocking for each win and general play in Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain also earns you coins that go towards random outfit pieces for your little cartoon avatar. The online mode is meant to carry a lot of the experience since outside of it you are mostly just expected to practice the 20 minigames on offer to try and better your performance, but luckily independent practice isn’t so basic that you’ll be bored trying to better your score. Good performances grab you more coins for those outfits, but you are also able to earn different types of medals based on your score in the minigames. Correct answers will raise your brain score and wrong ones drop it to prevent too much guessing, the timer for these games never over 60 seconds and thus part of doing well is just doing things properly in that small amount of time. It is an exciting challenge though, and the medals come in a few different tiers to spur you to do better. Silver medals are pretty easily earned and come with 1 to 3 stars but the gold medals and their higher star ratings require you to really be quick in figuring things out.

A platinum medal can be earned as well if your score hits over 1000 and that is no easy feat in most minigames, but if you can at least get gold in all 20 games you also earn a more challenging version of the practice mode. Normally all of the mental exercises start at the easiest difficulty and will climb up in difficulty as you answer more questions, even dropping down if you get one wrong after just rising up a tier. The harder practice mode you can unlock will throw you into the harder challenges immediately though, there still being room to climb but you’ll have far more things you need to remember or identify while still trying to squeeze in enough answers to earn a good score. Points are proportional to the difficulty though so you do benefit from tackling those tougher tiers. Having the two different practice modes gives you a bit more to shoot for if you want to get nice shiny medals on your profile as well, but beyond the drip feed of random clothing these two modes are the extent of the single player content save for the brain test.

The twenty minigames in Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain are split into five groups of four games each. The different categories are called Compute, Identify, Analyze, Memorize, and Visualize, the brain test plucking a random game from each category and having you play it in order to determine your score. At the end of this test your scores across the five games are totaled up and you are given a rating based on how you did as well as having your performance charted on a graph to show where you did well and where you came up short. You can retry the test as many times as you like and Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain will save high scores across all minigames and records of each test you attempt, the player always encouraged to try a bit better next time and the action being quick enough to encourage doing so either in small bursts or over and over again. Minigames can even be quit in an instant with a press of the plus button and hopped back into without delay in case you made an error you don’t want to continue on with, that itch to be a little more successful next time a solid motivator for constant play even if you can see most of what the game offers in a few hours.

The minigames themselves are certainly a part of the longevity, some possibly not going to click with you based on what tasks you like but most of them are sound concepts within their category. Perhaps only two have true issues that might bother a player. Shadow Shift has a group of silhouettes moving around the screen and you need to only pick the figures seen in shadow from the answers provided, but sometimes the shadows can end up clumped together and having to wait on them to split apart can waste a bit of precious time. Similarly, time is the main concern over in the fairly easy Flash Focus where an animal will gradually come into view either by a picture zooming out, gradually coming into focus, or by way of different segments of the image appearing. Many minigames here present the information almost immediately or move at a quick enough pace that you can answer rapidly enough to climb up the difficulty tiers quickly, but Flash Focus necessitates waiting a short while before it really is possible to pick the right answer, and with the game doing some intentional trickery like having rhino and elephant as possible answers for a grey blob you can’t just zip through on hunches. Some games that could have been a bit too slow do have solutions though, Covered Cages shuffling around bird cages covered with curtains and you need to find which ones contain birds. If you think you can figure it out more quickly than they’re shuffled you have the option to hold down a button to make them shuffle faster, adding a bit of interesting risk but a chance to chase those high scores at the pace you decide.

Flash Focus and Shadow Shift are still sound little minigames to play even if their medals are less achievable thanks to their design choices, and the minigames offered elsewhere do find ways to evolve beyond simply being about picking correct answers. One game takes the form of whack-a-mole where you need to quickly identify the symbols the moles are holding to smack the ones you’ve been told to hit, Tick Tock Turn has you winding a clock to move its time forward and back even in increments bigger than 300 minutes on higher difficulties, and Species Spotlight has you sweep a small area with a light to try and determine which cartoon animal is most present. Even games where you’re just picking answers can be fun or simple enough to try and really get on an exciting high-scoring tear. Speed Sorting presents a bunch of pictures of real world things (with an option to turn off bug pictures if they unsettle you) and you need to quickly pick those that match a description like having scales or even picking all items in order relative to their size or speed. This kind of game isn’t testing your mind too much but it is asking you to be quick to figure out what you’re meant to do, but other games like Match Blast ask for a careful hand as you break blocks to make a certain shape. The climb in difficulty can also turn a simple game into something more substantial, one game having you pop balloons with numbers on them from lowest to highest only for it to later introduce negative numbers and fractions to throw you off.

Trying to identify how an object would look from a certain angle, repeating a sequence in reverse, and many other simple but fun ideas presented in a friendly colorful style make Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain approachable despite its focus on intelligence, and even the local multiplayer tries to keep this up some. Here you will be directly competing against real players since they’ll be sitting beside you to play, but to try and close any gaps in how well players can handle the mental exercises you can set what difficulty they start at to try and get a bit closer to a fair fight. This is essentially just the minigame practice mode dressed up as a local competition though, the longevity of the content still mostly derived from personal motivation rather than a wide variety of unique content to play.

THE VERDICT: While the batch of 20 mental exercises in Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain makes for a rather slight package, especially since they are played in such quick bursts, the fun they provide still makes it an interesting an exciting minigame collection with some helpful contextualization to draw you back in. Trying to bump up your score a bit more, fighting against ghost data online, or aiming for a better score in the five category test gives you some simple but achievable goals to shoot for as you learn to up your reaction time. Low stakes unlocks mean you can jump in and out of the game without feeling like you’re missing much, and with most of the minigame concepts being solid fits for the rapid fire question answering, Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain keeps itself entertaining despite the lean offerings.

And so, I give Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain for Nintendo Switch…

A GOOD rating. Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain is mostly a case of wishing there was more to do because the good action on offer is satisfying but swiftly experienced. It does at least find a few means of greater longevity, the online structure ensuring there’s always new players to compete against since they aren’t actually required to be online, the scoring system giving you little benchmarks you’ll want to hit, and the five category test a great way to see if the practice really has paid off. Long term goals will have to be player made since the reward system mostly will give you random gifts for playing even if you don’t do the best, but this also means you aren’t going to be forced too hard into trying any minigames your specific brain might not click with. It is satisfying to see a shiny new medal after you pushed to get your answers in quickly and you do feel a bit smart when you sweep the floor with a ghost data opponent, the game managing quick exciting bursts of play that make it a fine game to return to for even just a few minutes. A little more variety in the game concepts could have been nice, a lot of them are about seeing the new question on screen and hitting the right answer as quickly as you can manage, but a few more interactive ones like the spotlight game and different answer formats like spinning the clock hands help vary things up a touch.

While you’ll always have simple direct in-person multiplayer as an option if you aren’t too worried about a game that touts itself as a batch of intelligence-focused challenges making someone feel inferior, Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain also provides ways to feel smarter than others without hurting any feelings and solo challenges where you compete your against your own expectations of your abilities. A simple but enticing rating system and gradual difficulty growth in a round of play make this the type of game you’ll play until you’re happy with your results, that potentially giving it much more life than the time it takes to experience its small set of unique content.