Challenge Me: Brain Puzzles (Nintendo DS) Review

Challenge Me: Brain Puzzles in name alone will sound to most people as if it is one of the multi-style products that bundles various sub-par brain teasing efforts into one cheap package. However, it is in fact two very familiar games in one: Picross and Sudoku, and is quite a pleasing little product. Brain Puzzles has no fancy introduction sequences or odd looking characters to guide you through the gameplay aspect - it is purely about getting the gamer straight into the thick of the action. Players are encouraged to challenge themselves by working through the large supply of puzzles on offer, pushing themselves to beat previous best completion times as well as increase their inputting accuracy to update the in-game graphs that supposedly show how active your brain is. For those that do not want to bother with that aspect, though, it is also possible to merely dive right into the various Sudoku and Picross puzzles on offer, taking your time and relaxing, exactly the way people like to do whilst travelling to and from work, or when relaxing at home. Unfortunately there are no multiplayer options for adding the sort of competitive edge that adds longevity to a game such as this, yet there are 500 Picross and 500 Sudoku teasers on offer, all of rapidly increasing difficulty, meaning there should be plenty to keep people busy.

For those that have somehow missed out on both these age-old puzzle types, Sudoku throws up a grid split into nine blocks, each of which contains nine smaller squares. The aim is to populate each of the main blocks with numbers 1-to-9 whilst ensuring there is no repetition of numbers in every horizontal row and vertical column, as well as in the main blocks. As for the mode that features a mixture of Picross and Colour Cross, it is a game based on the logic of numbers. Players are tasked with matching up the numbers listed along the top of the on-screen grid with the ones shown down the side, matching them according to both their respective colour and length. Once all the appropriate grid squares have been filled in, a picture is formed. For clarity's sake, should the grid be five squares both vertically and horizontally, with the first two and last two columns having a number '5' above them, this would mean all five squares in those columns would be coloured in, whilst the third column is left blank. If down the side there are five number '1's in a different colour, the only spaces left to fill would be the empty squares in column three, meaning these would be filled in with the new colour. The basic idea is amazingly simple once practiced, yet as the puzzles grow in complexity, hair loss may be a resulting factor due to stress!

When it comes to inputting numbers, stylus control is very important for accuracy purposes, especially given how this specific game will mark you down for even the slightest mistake. This is when Challenge Me falls down slightly, since there are instances where the game does not recognise which square has been tapped; in Sudoku this is not too much of an issue as there is another step before numbers are finalised, yet it can be quite an annoyance in Picross if a square is coloured in by accident whilst filling in large sectors of a grid in one fell swoop and the mistake is not noticed until towards the end of the puzzle, at which point it can cause much head-scratching and frowning as you try to work out where exactly you have gone wrong. The screen layout does not help too much either, with the DS turned on its side (as with Brain Training) not working as well as it has done in the past with the main focal point being the right-hand screen where the touch input takes place, meaning the main action on the left-hand side is hard to concentrate on in some cases. Yet on the whole if the user can overlook these troublesome niggles, Challenge Me: Brain Puzzles is yet another fine addition to the brain-training genre…