Great for your Prefrontal Cortex!

Although many Nintendo DS games are aimed toward children, Brain Age 2 is more for teens and adults. In fact, young children might get pretty angry at this game. Brain Age 2 contains all-new puzzles (different from the ones in Brain Age) and you don't need to have played Brain Age to understand Brain Age 2!

There are no wild adventures or flashy colors and music in this game, just Brain-enhancing puzzles and games, and a rather amusing floating doctor head on the menu screen.

"Exercise is the key to good health, both for body and mind - and now there's finally a way to make mental exercise simple, fun, even competitive. Inspired by the work of prominent Japanese neuroscientist Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, the Brain Age games feature activities designed to help stimulate your brain and give it the workout it needs like solving simple math problems, counting currency, drawing pictures on the Nintendo DS touch screen, and unscrambling letters." - Brain Age website

Like the original Brain Age, Brain Age 2 contains a Quick Play mode, a Daily Training mode, and Sudoku mode. In Quick Play mode, you can try "quick" versions of the Brain Age check, Training, and Sudoku. This mode is mainly for people new to the game who want to just get a taste for the different features. If you were to introduce this game to a friend, they could just play in quick mode to get a feel for the game. Rather than explain the Quick Play features, I'll describe the Daily Training mode, because Quick Play is just a shortened trial version of the Daily Training mode. In the Daily Training mode, you can do a Brain Age Check, Training, view a Graph of your progress in various games, or change your Game Settings under "Other Options". In the Brain Age Check, you play three consecutive, randomly-chosen test games(5 games to randomly choose from). After you play through the three games, you receive your Brain Age; the "best" score you can get is 20 years old, though if you are over 20, getting your actual age is pretty good too! The point of this game is to try and practice these games(in Training) every day to keep your brain youthful and active and to get and keep your Brain Age low. The Brain Age test games are somewhat difficult; for example, one of the games requires you to look at a drawing of a hand in "rock", "paper", or "scissors" form and say into the microphone "rock", "paper", or "scissors" quickly, depending on if the instructions say to lose or win to the shown hand. Other tests deal with numbers, such as "High Number" show many numbers on the screen and you have to tap, with your stylus, the highest number. Sometimes the numbers will rotate or move to make the game more difficult.

In the Training part of Daily Training mode, there are 10 training games that, if you play them every day, should help you increase your Brain Age over time. These games, however are different from the games you actually use to find your Brain Age, but some of them are quite fun! You start out with only a few games available to play, and you unlock new ones to play while you continue to train with the other games. The Training games are: Sign Finder (a math problem is given but with no '+','-','x', or '/' signs, and you give the correct mathematical sign based on the math problem), Piano Player (notes are shown on the left screen and you hit the matching key on the right screen piano as they are shown on the left), Word Scramble (letters are scattered on the screen and you unscramble them to form a word), Memory Sprint (you watch grey and black stick people in a 'race' and you keep track of which place the dark racer is in), Change Maker (you act as a cashier and give correct change by subtracting the purchase cost from the amount of money given), Word Blend (two or more words are said simultaneously and you have to write what words are said), Calendar Count (based on the actual day you play, you answer questions such as 'What day will it be in 3 days?'), Math Recall (You calculate math problems while remembering which numbers are in the problem when they are crossed out), Block Count (blocks fall Tetris-style into a shaded area and you remember how high the labeled columns get), and Clock Spin(you look at a clock on the left screen and write what time it is on the left screen). My personal favorites are Word Scramble, Piano Player, and Word Blend, but everyone I know has different preferences. Also, four players can keep their Training and Brain Age information saved on one game card.

In the Sudoku mode, there are over 100 Sudoku puzzles, in Basic, Intermediate, and Hard difficulties. You start out with only Basic and Intermediate puzzles, but when you play those, you unlock the harder difficulty level. So even if you don't particularly like the Training games, or you get tired of them for a while, you can still have lots of fun playing the Sudoku puzzles! I tend to play the Training mode until I get really good scores in all or most of the games and then I stop playing the Training mode for a few weeks and just play Sudoku. I always eventually go back to Training mode!

There are also a few short games that the Doctor will randomly ask you to play every once in a while, such as coming up with witty acrostics and drawing objects from memory.(And you can compare your results to your friends' results if they play on the same game card!)

The game's music is rather sci-fi or composed of computer-sounding beeps and a background beat. It is not annoying or particularly catchy, but it does it's job.
The graphics are nothing to call home about, but they aren't bad! For puzzle games such as this, strong impressive graphics are not necessary because much of the game is comprised of words or symbols.

As I mentioned before, this game was designed for teens and adults, not really for children. Young teens and children may not enjoy the "educational" games that Brain Age 2 offers, but some might and I know some children who do enjoy Brain Age 2. This game is great for seniors who want to keep their brains active with puzzle games! It would be quite fun for a grandparent to play with their grandson/daughter to see who can get the better scores! (How amusing if the grandparent gets a younger brain age than their son/daughter/grandchildren!) People who like math games or puzzles will definitely like Brain Age 2 as it was designed for this crowd! However, if you were never really the puzzle-playing type, you could still benefit from this game and you might end up liking the competition with yourself and others who might play your game.

I would recommend Brain Age 2 to anyone who wants to play a game while improving their brain!