Brain Training games have gone into hiding in recent years after a surge of popularity in the late 2000’s. Professor Rubik’s Brain Fitness aims to revive the genre with a nifty Rubik’s cube based licence that fits perfectly into the brain teaser genre. The foundations of a great series are here, it just needs a little more variety.
Professor Rubik’s Brain Fitness has two very distinct parts to its game and they don’t cross over at all. The first is the brain fitness area which provides you with 22 mini games to test your brain skills. The game asks you to practice three a day and take a test of six chosen at random to determine your brain score. The test then tells you where your brain has developed (or shrunk) over time and points you in the direction of games that will help that area. The brain is split into logic, letters, agility, memory, concentration and spatial and so are the mini games.
The 22 mini games make excellent use of the Rubik’s licence. One explodes a Rubik’s Cube and you have to work out where several marked cubes landed. Another twists the cube and you have to see what the next pattern will be. Another turns the cube into a maths puzzle to solve or colour identification. Some are more akin to scrabble or boggle, unjumbling words, spotting anagrams or odd ones out. There’s a nice variety and everything feels lab-like and clean.
The second part of the game contains four challenge games that are a bit more beefy. There’s a twist on 2048 which uses three sides of a Rubik’s cube. There’s a Puyo-Puyo clone that doesn’t work quite as well as the original but is a light time waster. A Minesweep clone works much better whilst the dreaded rotating slider puzzle drove me up the wall, as all slider puzzles do. These can be enjoyed in single and multiplayer player.
So far, everything sounds quite good and it is. There are two rather large drawbacks though.
The first is the control scheme for picking an answer in the mini games. It relies on choosing an option from an 8 directional choice and selecting it. This is fine but the answers are always randomly jumbled up, costing precious tenths up to a second as you read and choose. Rubik’s is very harsh on scoring and this will mean you won’t trouble S ranks, nor likely A ranks unless you speed read.
The second issue is far more damaging. Many of the 22 mini games only have a few variations and after a couple of days playing, you’ll see repeated. The anagram puzzle is the worst offender, giving repeats in the same game, sometimes multiple times. This means you aren’t training your brain, you are relying on memory alone. This makes about half the game modes a bit redundant as the same thing is asked of you over and over again. It is such a shame as if each mini game had answer variety, Professor Rubik’s Brain Fitness would have the staying power it expects its players to commit to. It wants you to return day after day for at least a month and to complete 100 tests. Why would you answer the exact same questions over and over again?
That is what dramatically sways my score. The game burns itself out before it should because of the repetition. I really enjoyed the licence being applied into brain fitness puzzles though – it just works really well. This is a great concept that I’d love to see expanded in a sequel but with more variety and options please. I’d only recommend this on a heavy sale at the moment.
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