[REVIEW] de BIG BRAIN ACADEMY: Batalla de Ingenio (Switch)

Anyone would say we’re back in 2006, that dual-screen notebooks are all the rage and that the Touch generations! is in full swing. But no, we are in the year 2021, the age of Smart, Metaverses and a Nintendo Switch that is not satisfied with touching millionaire figures. If we recently talked about Warioware in Hybrid and almost two years ago about Brain Training, I want and have to save another title today that shone thanks to a pen: Big Brain Academy.

Though I’m not doing it to cover the DS game that came out in 2006 that told us how much our brain weighed. Not to mention the Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree, which came on the famous Wii in 2007. It’s time to check out the heir to the two of them who left me shattered for days with a touch of the touch and Joy-Con in my hand, Big Brain Academy: Clash of Ingenuity.

I’ve taken permission to speak of its predecessors because it’s impossible to watch the new Big Brain Academy without thinking about the previous ones. It grew out of this stream of games that wanted to be more than just games and show that video games can be more than pointless fun or stories taken from epics. A title designed to train our minds with challenges of all kinds and which now reaches a perfect console for the masses on Switch (like DS and Wii), although it rests a bit on its laurels.

Why am i saying this? Let’s get to the numbers, a little more than enough for a game that, among other things, tries to develop our level of logic. With touch or button control, Big Brain Academy: Battle of Wits features 20 mini-gameseach lasting 60 seconds and divided equally into five categories (sharpness, memory, analysis, calculation and perception). Is there anything else? No. These twenty tests are the brain that everything else in this game is born out of.

The rest are nerve extensions that put a little strain on the nerves in the long run. While the sanity battle that this Big Brain Academy has is indicative of its strong multiplayer component, it sometimes seems to relate to what it took to create it. In the review area, you can repeat exercises daily and try to get better results to get gold or platinum medals while you unlock up to 300 aesthetic accessories for your simple but nice avatar (server is a “doll” version of Luke Skywalker, more would be missing). And while it’s true that if you manage to win at least one gold medal in every game you unlock Super Review Mode as a reward for being the smartest on your console, what it offers as a reward isn’t value.

And what’s the reward? The same mini-games, but with a higher level of difficulty. In total there is a total of 6 difficulties that appear in the same test you succeed in (Toddler, Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Elite, and Super-Elite). In the Super Review, on the other hand, you start with the Advanced level of difficulty. To make matters worse, the vast majority of tests come from the Wii game (Cazatopos, Mazomáticas, Night Jungle, Dancing Cages, Reverse Memory, and many others are over 10 years old), although there is a little more here on Switch.

This is part of the daily training that you can test on the exam, a sequence of five tests, one from each category that adds the final grade to give you a grade and indicate the type of your brain. A mechanism that was already there in the original, even in brain training when it indicated our brain age, and which serves as a challenge for you to keep training your brain. It works, it’s fun, and it’s challenging, but I can’t understand the incentive to say what kind of brain you have when you narrow it down to the category that stands out the most. Yes, I know my brain type is memory when my memory is better. It seems that the a touch of humor from the DS originalwho showed professions based on your skills, even if they sounded crazy.

Then there is his Multiplayer part both locally (activated before the game starts) and online. The latter is considered the big draw of the Big Brain Academy: Battle of Ingenuity, where your student competes against the ghosts of other students in the world. Rank in the monthly world ranking by collecting trophies obtained by defeating ghosts in one of the five main mental categories, albeit with random mini-games.

The games take place at better than 100 points and you can guess the difficulty level of the challenge based on your opponent’s brain power. It’s by far the most challenging part of the entire game and the one that really tests your brain. Although climbing positions is achieved by collecting points that you get by winning, you can earn them by exchanging your opponent for one who has less strength and therefore makes things easier for you. Yes, it’s like cheating and it makes it a bit unfair to get the highest positions.

The local multiplayer offers games for up to 4 players (from 2 only playable with controllers) in fast rounds with the usual tests. The winner is the one who collects the most points in the end in a predetermined total number of games, with everyone being able to play in each round with the level of difficulty they want. The latter, interesting when playing with children at home, but completely unbalanced in roughly the same age groups. It’s frustrating waiting for your dancing cages to stop so you can choose while your opponent is only making three easy moves.

That is also frustrating Button control in certain games (for example in Balloon Pinch, you move the stick more by intuition than by visual cues). There remains to be a twist on this control option to make it really interesting, although it is always more advisable to play with the touchscreen.

He’s arriving on the final leg of a year as strange as it is nostalgic, and many come to him for both the nostalgia and the appeal of facing a video game whose central formula isn’t playful. Big Brain Academy: Battle of Wits is a good companion for Dr. Kawashima’s brain training for Nintendo Switch, but wherever he dared, the Brain Academy settles down. Kawashima’s latest hybrid even made use of the Joy-Con’s infrared sensor and even came with a pen to use its handwriting recognition system. Academy is limited to using the touch screen.

It’s limited, customized, and recycled. In short, no matter how much a new platform achieves, It doesn’t seem like a new game. It’s like the Wii, now portable, with online multiplayer and a few other mini-games. However you look at it, it is not up to date. Good as a challenge and as a daily exercise for anyone who wants to test their skills. Bad as a game that goes on over time.