The Nintendo DS has thrived on brain games like the Brain Age series, its more mature cousin Big Brain Academy and even the recently released Professor Layton and the Curious Village just to name a few. Now Neko Entertainment and Conspiracy Games bring French developer Otaboo’s brain teaser to us called Best of Tests DS. It is being sold as a game that will quantify your IQ as you go through the game. Unfortunately, it does no such thing and actually just keeps a tally of your cumulative score. Nowhere was an IQ number seen, but pushing that misinformation aside you’ll find that this game will keep you mildly interested at best.
The game is basically split into two modes: Intelligence and Memory quizzes. In each mode you have to play through three levels (Easy, Medium, Difficult) in succession. You also have to do each of the quiz subsections (Short, Medium, Long) in succession as well. Each length corresponds to 10, 20 and 30 questions. The Intelligence quiz is more geared toward pattern recognition, mathematics, counting sides on a 3D object and vocabulary (synonyms and antonyms). As expected the easy section is pretty easy, but once you get to the difficult section some of the mathematic and vocabulary problems can really screw you up and you do have to get a certain number of the questions right in order to unlock the next level. The only indication of a right or wrong answer is by a floating professor head that either gives you thumbs up or a stern look and there is no correct answer given when you get a question wrong. Once you have finished through the three levels of difficulty and their subsections of length you unlock timed versions of the quizzes. This of course makes things even more difficult, especially in the mathematical and pattern recognition sections.
The second section of the quizzes works much the same as the first, except this one is memory based. You often have to remember such things as where objects were located, what the missing object is, etc. Much like the intelligence quizzes once you finish off all the levels you unlock the timed versions of the quizzes.
The game is played with the stylus, but unlike the Brain Age games and its ilk from Nintendo you do not write in your answers. In each and every case you choose from multiple choices or you press buttons. It’s a shame that the developer couldn’t go that extra mile and allow the player to write in their answers, it would have made the game a bit more hands-on than it is. The only spot things become confusing when hitting buttons is when the game gives you an anagram and you have to spell out what type of word the professor is asking for. If the answer uses the same letter multiple times it looks weird because you have only five letters to touch, but the answer is nine letters long.
This game certainly does have a variety of questions (they advertise there being hundreds), although there are some vocabulary questions that come up repeatedly. The mathematic questions seem to never repeat though, so one can only guess that there is an algorithm of some sort in the mathematical questions. It is also interesting to note that any sort of money question where you grab seven of something at X money and three at Y money are done in Euros and not American dollars. Best guess at why they use Euros is because the developer is from France and when it was brought over to North America they decided to not change the currency.
Unfortunately many of you probably won’t even bother to go through all the difficulties and subsections of length in order to see the totality of the game. It is a bad sign when you are unable to choose your difficulty level right from the beginning and the game makes you go through the easier difficulties in order to get to the truly difficult ones. It takes only a matter of hours to get through the levels in both quizzes minus the timed options that are unlocked at the end. Best of Tests DS is at best a game to pick up if you’re the type of gamer that simply needs to own every single brain testing game on the DS, otherwise – skip it.
