Parents' Guide to

Brain Age: Concentration Training

By Chad Sapieha, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 10+

Brain training game purports to help your working memory.

Game Nintendo 3DS 2013
Brain Age: Concentration Training Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this game.

Community Reviews

There aren't any parent reviews yet. Be the first to review this title.

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say: Not yet rated
Kids say: Not yet rated

The latest Brain Age game has no shortage of activities, unlockable extras, and interesting factoids, but is nonetheless fraught with problems, the most glaring of which is that it's often just not much fun. Automatic adjustment of difficulty in devilish training exercises keeps you on the very edge of what you can handle. That means players experience failure and level demotion as often as they succeed, which can become quite disheartening. Plus, activity difficulty seems imbalanced. We couldn't progress past the second or third level in "devilish calculations" after nearly a week of play, but advanced to level 8 in both "devilish pairs" and "devilish blocks" on the first day.

Exacerbating matters is the series' lingering problem with writing recognition. The software often misinterprets the rendering of the characters 2, 4, B, and M, which forces the player to redraw them. This means that players lose focus and concentration, consequently forgetting the bits of information they were supposed to remember. The only thing more frustrating than failing an exercise due to lack of ability is failing one due to a technical problem. Brain Age: Concentration Training could prove compelling for kids with precise printing and a high tolerance for failure, but everyone else is apt to find more aggravation than fun.

Game Details

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

See how we rate