Brain Tacho

There's nothing like a good pun to oil the cogs of your mind. Take the second word in the title of this puzzler from FDG Soft. 'Tacho' derives from the ancient Greek for 'speed', as in the word 'tachometer', referring to an instrument that measures velocity, and 'tachycardia', which literally means 'fast heart.'

So on the surface Brain Tacho is a game about brain speed. However, 'tacho' is also homophonous (you're overclocking my mind already – Ed) with the more common word 'taco,' a Mexican foodstuff.

Like the human brain, the taco is a kind of salty gruel, a stew of dicey cud held in place by a brittle case. It was inevitable that the comparison would be drawn, as FDG Soft has apparently done, albeit indirectly, with Brain Tacho.

Strictly speaking, though, most brains (those of professional footballers and horoscope readers are excluded) have more processing power than Mexican food, so the suggestive nature of Brain Tacho's title may also be, in a clever double-twist, that playing the game will reduce your brain to a food-like state.

Its attempt to achieve this consists of inviting you to play two puzzle games. If this seems a vain ambition, bear in mind that there are some very difficult puzzles out there. One commercially available double-sided jigsaw yields a prize of £1 million if completed, and some mathematical conundrums have been tying the world's finest minds in knots for years.

However, neither of the puzzles on offer in Brain Tacho are likely to cross many eyes.

The first is simply adding up. As in one of the component games in the massively popular DS title Dr Kawashima's Brain Training, sums like 2 x 2 and 8 + 3 appear on the screen and you respond by using '4', '5', or '6' to choose from three multiple choice answers.

A timer constantly shrinks along the top of the screen, regenerating every time you get an answer right. When you get an answer wrong, you lose one of your three lives, and the loss of all three spells the end of the game, as does the full depletion of your time. Your points are a reflection of how long you last.

The second puzzle is a kind of colour arithmetic. Two squares appear along the top, and at the bottom are three coloured arrows. Using the thumbstick, you need to choose the one representing the hue you would have if you blended the two in the squares. For instance, if one square is blue and the other is yellow, the correct arrow to choose would be green.

Not all of the mixtures are as basic as blue and yellow, of course. Some are more subtle, like blue and purple, or red and orange, so that picking the right blend isn't as straightforward as it sounds. As with the sums, you have three lives and a constantly contracting timer to contend with.

We know what you're thinking: it all sounds incredibly easy. And it's true, as we've said, neither puzzle will cross many eyes. The trick up Brain Tacho's sleeve however is that you don't tackle them in isolation.

You take them both on at once.

The number game appears on the left of the screen and the colour game on the right, both timed simultaneously so that play involves switching from one game to the other, making sure the timer doesn't run down in either. Thus from the two activities emerges a third: plate-spinning.

It's an interesting premise, and tricky to pull off. Simplistic as it is, Brain Tacho is genuinely taxing and fast-paced, and fairly enjoyable as a result.

But fun as it is over the first few plays, the grinding repetition gives you very little incentive to get beyond reaching the initially daunting array of astronomical built-in high-scores. After all, you're just doing the same thing over and over and over. And, as you might imagine, testing your ability to do sums for ten minutes at a time has limited appeal after the first 600 seconds.