Previews

Hands on with Dr Reiner Knizia's Brainbenders on DS

The doctor is ready for you now

Hands on with Dr Reiner Knizia's Brainbenders on DS

It seems Dr Reiner Knizia is quite a talented bloke, having designed a whole load of award-winning boardgames (his first one when just aged six) and having worked as a quantitative analyst.

Smart he might be though, but he's also quite cocky in his new game – regularly popping up on our DS's top screen to tell us we should be doing better. Still, going by his dress sense at least, he doesn't take himself too seriously. If we're going to be told we're rubbish at boardgames, we at least want to be told by a geeky looking man in a safari suit. He's like Dr Kawashima on one of his days off from the laboratory.

Talking of the great Dr Kawashima, it would be very easy to lump Dr Reiner Knizia's Brainbenders into the 'another brain training game' category and be done with it. But, as our recent go on the game has revealed, it's actually very little like a brain training game and more a collection of puzzles.

This collection comprises 16 such challenges in total, which is relatively generous by anyone's standards. And they're all very different, too. The game's World Tour mode (which makes it sounds a bit like tennis competition) puts you on a world map that can be scrolled about on the touchscreen with certain countries selectable. So you can choose to crack safes in Japan or play poker in Vegas – just as soon as a country has been unlocked by earning enough points, you can visit it as many times as you like to compete in its challenge.

Of those we played, there were very few duff examples. One is like a version of Mine Sweeper, where you tap on squares to uncover either a part of a shape you're looking for or a number that says how many squares surrounding it will unveil a bit of shape. There's also a game where you need to drag numbers into boxes to make up the correct sums running vertically and horizontally.

The poker game has you dragging cards into rows to make the best hands available, and there's a Tetris-style game where you need to fit smaller shapes into a bigger one and make sure they all fit. In all of the games, the quicker you work and the less mistakes you make the better – and the happier the enigmatic Dr Knizia will be at the end of the affair.

As well as being varied, Brainbenders seems like it'll be playable for pretty much everyone thanks to its five difficulty levels for each game. These are unlockable as you progress, so the final bonus one will only be available to those with the sorts of brains that'd put Knizia's own to shame. At the other end of the scale, on level one, few will probably struggle but puzzle grids obviously get bigger, harder and more complicated as you go.

Multiplayer wasn't included in the version we played – we're not even sure if there is a head-to-head mode, although Eidos told us you will be able to send puzzles you're stuck on over to someone else's DS. So you'll at least be able to wrack brains next to one another on the bus, and see who can solve it first.

There are plenty of puzzle games already out there for DS and even more brain training ones. But Brainbenders could well straddle both these genres on its release and offer a sort of compilation for anyone who just wants to spend hours poring over addictive little puzzles. Some you might have seen before in some guise or other but they're perfectly at home on DS where its touchscreen enables you to drag numbers and shapes about the screen with ease.

Dr Reiner Knizia's Brainbenders is due for release later this month so we'll be giving him an even more thorough going over then. Click 'Track It!' to be informed as soon as it's reviewed.

Kath Brice
Kath Brice
Kath gave up a job working with animals five years ago to join the world of video game journalism, which now sees her running our DS section. With so many male work colleagues, many have asked if she notices any difference.