• Genre: Education
• Price: R399.95
• Publisher: Namco Bandai
• Platform: Xbox 360 Kinect

As a mom of two boys, aged 4 and 8, that love Xbox games, I’m quite keen to explore more educational games that the kids could play on their Xbox 360, so I was very keen to try out Dr Kawashima’s Body and Brain Exercises with them.

This game is based on the research of Dr Kawashima and comprises exercises that aim to reduce your brain age. It’s a multiplayer game allowing up to four people to play together, and is supposedly appropriate for kids aged three and upwards.

When you turn the game on, the first thing you have to do is get your brain age calculated by doing some exercises. The idea is that you do this test every day to see how you’ve improved.

This worked quite well for me. I would have liked my brain age to be younger, but it was close to my real age. For my 8-year-old son though, this proved to be a huge disappointment. According to the game, his brain age was 76 on the first day… and after playing it for a few days, it’s now down to 53. It’s very clearly been designed with an adult brain in mind, and doesn’t account for a child playing it.

After you calculate your brain age, the game takes you a few recommended daily exercises. These are quite fun to do because they seem pretty randomly selected so you’re not sure what exercise is going to come up.

Some of the games are quite fun, and others are just frustrating because the Kinect seemed to struggle to pick up some of the movements for them. Some of them are just frustrating because your memory (or rather my memory) is not quite as good as you would like! There are exercises that require mental additions and multiplication, others that require physical coordination (like boxing balloons and guiding cars across bridges), and some that require some memory as well as physical coordination (remembering positions of numbers or body poses).

Every exercise that you do is ranked and graded. We managed to get a B on one of the exercises, much to the delight of the kids, but for the most part, we’ve been graded with C’s and D’s and F’s. Again, the kids got quite disappointed with the scores, but I liked that we could challenge each other to better one another’s scores. If your score is good, more difficult levels are unlocked, but we found even the beginner levels for some of the exercises were quite taxing.

I would like to be able to encourage my kids to play the game, because once my older son actually starts playing, he enjoys it… especially the maths games and the coordination ones, but that brain age test seriously puts him off it. It’s clearly been designed for adults, even though the age limit on the game says otherwise, and that’s very disappointing. I would have liked to see the game somehow compensate for his real age in some way.

It’s a fun game to play if you can read and do maths, but it’s really not an appropriate game for younger kids even though the age rating is 3+ because it’s just so frustrating for them, and they need a lot of help with almost every exercise.

For adults though, Dr. Kawashima’s Body and Brain Exercises is challenging and is quite a bit of fun. It definitely does motivate you to try and get your brain age lower.

Turn ons:

• The multiplayer functionality allowing you to play against friends, and it also remembers everyone’s scores
• Excellent maths games for kids learning to do arithmetic
• It’s a challenging game

Turn offs:

• There are very few games that young kids can actually do 
• The instructions that appear before each game are very annoying especially when you’ve played it a few times, and make playing with the game quite disjointed because you have to wait so long between exercises
• Sense of failure especially in the multiplayer games when the scoring mechanism calls you names when you don’t get enough answers correct