As a student there are many things I have done to make my brain maybe not quite as efficient as it should be; late lie-ins, nights in the student bar, afternoons in front of Deal or No Deal... So twelve months after I bought the original Brain Training, I decided to dip my toes back into the water of neural stimulation and purchase the sequel, with the imaginative title of More Brain Training from Dr Kawashima: How Old Is Your Brain? To be honest, I don't think that Nintendo spent much brainpower on the name, but what I do know is that it was a no-brainer in bringing the game back, with the huge success of the original.

Not much has changed this time around. The principle of the game is still the same: perform a series of tasks each day to test your numeracy, literacy and logic skills before testing your brain with three of these tests picked at random. Thrown into the mix are another 100 or so sudoku puzzles, along with other tasks such as joining-the-dots and drawing to test your brain's more creative side. Inside the package you get a substantial booklet revealing the science behind the software and instructions on how to perform each of the mini-games, although there are sufficient instructions in-game and they all work well enough. One thing the designers have stressed in the booklet is how to correctly write the characters to make the handwriting recognition work better, although in my experience the only difficulty I found was that it kept recognising I's as L's - and my writing is messier than a military mess hall.

When you start the game, the first thing it does is test your brain for the first time, with three random games. I was relieved that I managed to score a respectable age of 36 - 15 years too old, but not bad for the first go. Twelve months ago, when I played the original, I started off in the 70s, so either the first game did improve my brain or twelve months of stimulating post-pub chat works wonders that scientists have yet to appreciate! With the niceties of the first brain test and setting of your name and age out of the way, the full scope of the game becomes available.

Firstly, you have access to the sudoku games, which haven't changed in presentation since the original. The concept of sudoku is to place numbers into a grid that gives you a few numbers to begin with, and you have to work out the correct placement of the rest. The 9x9 grid is split into 9 sub-grids, each of them 3x3, and you must place numbers so that the numbers 1 to 9 occur only once in each of the 9 rows, 9 columns and 9 sub-grids. The main grid is displayed on the touch screen and clicking a square allows you to either write in the number or a possible number along the side in a smaller font. This works really well and is a pleasure to play; it's no trickier than just doing it in a puzzle book, except there's no mess and you can rub out wrong answers far easier. There's a cheat mode that alerts you when you make a mistake, with up to five allowed, and there are three levels of difficulty available.

Then there's the main bulk of the game - the daily training. You start off with just three games, but build them up as you do the training every day. For every day you complete the training, you get a stamp and the more stamps you earn, the more games you unlock. The games in this version are for more rewarding than the original game. Gone are the ones of a similar theme (20 and 100 calculations were both based around the same idea in the first game), with a wider variety of all-new games that, after several days of playing, are much more difficult in my opinion. There are games to enter missing symbols to make calculations add up, a musical game to press keys on a touch-screen piano at the right time and a timed solve-the-anagram task. There are ten of these games overall - and I don't want to spoil the nature of all of them here, as a lot of the fun is unlocking them to find out what's coming next. All the games seem fresh and more interesting than the original, though I may be being unjust to the first game as, after three months of playing that one daily, the sheen was gone.

The touch screen and microphone inputs work a treat and, aside from the odd problem with the handwriting recognition, there are no real problems. The sound is clear - a vital test when it comes to one of the games on offer - though headphones are a must if you're in a noisy environment. Not that you'd want to play the game in public, as my experience of playing the first one and shouting out either blue, red, black or yellow during one test on a packed train did get me some funny looks! There's also a spin on the classic Dr Mario game as well, which can be unlocked to give your brain a well-earned rest.

But before that point you need to do the brain age check, which is basically three games picked at random for you to complete, which includes four not available in daily training. The first is a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, where you have to shout out the appropriate term. The voice recognition occasionally slips up, but you learn to adapt to that. The trickiest thing I had to learn was to stop saying "stone" instead of "rock", as I thought back to playing the game as a child. The second game is called Continuous Countdown, where you have to keep subtracting from a number and this is far more challenging and interesting than it sounds. I shall leave you to discover the other two yourself. Upon completion, you get a brain age of anything from twenty or above. A brain age of twenty is the peak age, and that's your aim when playing.

There will be some out there who think that playing a game that's basically a glorified Mensa and maths test is their idea of hell and they'd rather be battling zombies or playing football simulators. But the game is actually really involving and only takes ten minutes of your time a day, which isn't too much to ask if it does really improve your brain.

For those of you who embrace the multiplayer aspect of the DS, More Brain Training does not disappoint you. Building on the lacklustre multiplayer of the first game, which was hardly exciting, there are lots of options for single-cart play for up to sixteen players, including memory, picture, English and maths quizzes. It may not be as attractive to your friends as battling it out on Mario Kart, but it will give the winner satisfaction that their brain is younger than someone else's - surely a boasting point if ever there was one - and this is surely more rewarding than discovering you can fire a red shell better than another person! [I don't know, sounds like a close call to me! Ed].

Graphically the game isn't amazing; the design is much the same as the original game, with plain white backgrounds. There are no fancy effects or animations, but it does its job and that's all that can be asked for, or indeed is needed, for a game of this type. The same can be said for the music. It's not amazing, but the inclusion of actual pieces of music in one of the challenges and speech in another works where it needs to. It's a game that's happy to do what it needs to train your brain and nothing more.

More Brain Training is a game that has great lasting appeal. It might not take you more than a couple of weeks to unlock everything, but once that's done, the lifespan of the game continues with improving your brain age, beating your high scores on the challenges and completing the Sudoku puzzles. After about three months you'll probably be sick of the game but, if you're like me, will return to it every so often to see if your brain is still as fit as it should be. So, if you enjoyed the original then you'll love More Brain Training from Dr. Kawashima: How Old Is Your Brain? with its fresh challenges, new sudoku puzzles and higher difficulty level. If you didn't play the original but want to test your brain then this is the best version to get. It may be plain and looks very bookish compared to other games, but it's a great experience that's perfect for the DS, and it holds great appeal to non-gamers of all ages, male and female, showing just what Nintendo's revolutionary handheld is capable of as well as its more traditional style games.

Reviewed by Philip Lickley for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).