Taking a note out of the long-running Brain Age series on the Nintendo DS, Smart As… is the latest (standalone) game in the ‘Brain Training’ genre for the Playstation Vita, where you are provided with daily challenges and a plethora of mini-games which can assumingly improve your abilities in Logic, Arithmetic, Language and Observation. While I cannot say just how strong its scientific effectiveness is, Smart As… turns out to be a pretty fun title that even aside from the daily challenges offers you quite a bit more to do.
As mentioned above, you begin the game by being presented with a number of options – the most obvious being to do a daily brain challenge which takes you through a total of four games (Each based on one of the four main focus areas – Logic, Arithmetic, Language and Observation) and then rewards you with a percentage score of how well you performed. Each of the games you play earns you a percentage out of 100% and a star score out of three, which are then used to determine your final score, and a high score system does work well in helping you surpass your previous efforts.
There are a couple of games included in this rotation for each area, and while each in my opinion suit the field well some are more difficult than others. The language and arithmetic games are relatively easy, often requiring you to find a missing letter/number, merging values to make up a total or finding the odd word out. On the other hand the logic and observation games both offer more of a challenge and punish lapses in judgement with five second penalties. Overall while one bad game can be a difference between a great score and a very average score, it was a solid system which builds into the social features I will discuss a little later in this review.
The game doesn’t end after the first few minutes every day – offering a sizable number of “Free Play” games which are either based off or unique to the games included in the Daily Training. Each of the four categories contain five games each of which contain four difficulty levels. While some can be mind boggling at times all of them are actually pretty well thought out and make use of the Vita’s many capabilities from the front/back touch screens, gyrosensor, camera and even the QR cards if you haven’t lost them since the consoles launch. With high scores recorded and considering the fact they can get rather challenging at the end – the real fun in the game lies here. To unlock the games, you need to complete the daily challenges.
The game tracks your progress which you can compare against your friends or share on Facebook/Twitter. During loading screens, the game also shows you information on yourself compared with the rest of the world – from how you are against the rest of the country, how you compare against people who prefer Skiing over Snowboarding or one of several other topics which the game periodically collects from you. Smart As… also allows you to compare yourself against the rest of the world or a subset thereof. Street Smart and Near functionalities also offer additional challenges but for the purpose of this review they were not tested.
There are a few gripes with this game, namely when imputing text using the touchscreen it may require occasional shifting of upper/lowercase lettering or otherwise will occasionally mis-identify the word or number inputted – but otherwise it is a simple albeit well implemented system.
Visually the game looks simplistic and non-distracting, but makes good use of bright colours and other aesthetic features which make the experience enjoyable. The music is also simple which as with the visuals serve to keep your attention to the task at hand. Where the game does really succeed is in choosing John Cleese to narrate practically every help, question and results screen in the game with witty and suitable dialogue. As with LittleBigPlanet and Stephen Fry – having narrators like the two of them really do improve the experience.
Overall, Smart As… was a pretty fun game while it lasted, and made use of the Vita’s features well in order to deliver a ‘brain training’ experience.
Final Score
Storyline/Character Development: N/A
Design: B
Music/Voice Acting: B
Gameplay: B+
Replayability: B
Personal Opinion: B
Overall Score: B
Special Thanks to Sony Computer Entertainment Australia for providing me with a copy of this game to review.
