Playing Razorback Studios’ Brain Voyage has an effect similar to eating a slice of pizza anywhere in the US other than New York; it may not be very enjoyable, but it makes one truly appreciate the quality of the good stuff (/NY superiority complex).
In all seriousness, Brain Voyage is the latest member of the “brain game” bandwagon, but does very little to add to the emerging genre, and falls short in real entertainment value. In other words, this isn’t NY pizza (okay, now I’m done with that analogy, I promise).
Brain Voyage features 16 different puzzle types with 5 variations each. They are not all available from the beginning, however. Players complete the early puzzles to win coins, which can then be used to purchase new puzzles, or higher difficulty levels on existing ones. The number of coins a player earns is based on their score for that particular puzzle. There are bronze, silver, and gold medals, and each one is worth more coins than the last.
This isn’t called Brain Voyage just for kicks; the puzzles aren’t arranged in a simple menu, but are accessed via points on a world map and played with those cities as backdrops. That may sound like a fresh and interesting approach, but in actuality it makes selecting the desired puzzle much more difficult. None of the cities are labelled with the type of puzzle played there, even after clicking through from the world map to the puzzle level select. It’s only when the puzzle begins that its identity is revealed, so either memorize which puzzles go with which cities, or don’t expect to be able to choose the type of puzzle you want to play at any given moment.
There are a couple of other modes in Brain Voyage, but they are fairly insubstantial. In random play, the game will string together 4, 8, or 16 puzzles and keep a runnning total of points accrued across all of them. There is a leaderboard at the end where players can see their names go up in lights (by that I mean plain text). One can also directly access and replay puzzles that he or she decided to save while “voyaging,” although I found little incentive to ever make use of that feature. The puzzles simply aren’t engaging enough to want to replay for “fun.”
The puzzles themselves are based off of simple games that just about everyone should be familiar with. Minesweeper, mazes, matching, Simon, peg solitaire, and counting (yes, counting) are just a few of the less-than-exciting games that players will tackle on this voyage. It isn’t quite Professor Layton or even Brain Age, so don’t expect to be wowed by the puzzle quality.
The audio and visual presentation is not very impressive, either. The graphics are very simple and undetailed, and the music sounds like something out of the 8- or 16-bit era. Interestingly, the game’s host looks like a significantly less menacing and poorly rendered version of Nintendo president Reggie Fils-Amie.
There are better “brain games” on the market than Brain Voyage, to put things simply. For quick and engaging play, try the Brain Age games, and for a little more depth and intelligence, there’s the stellar Professor Layton and the Curious Village. As for Brain Voyage, I can’t bring myself to recommend picking it up.
