Unless you don’t mind some pretty serious repetition, a rental is all you’ll need to enjoy the novelty here.
The first thing you’ll need to do in Big Brain Academy is enroll. This boils down to selecting a Mii and hearing a couple basic explanations about how to use the different facets of the Academy. This includes an Office to check the records of all the players on your Wii, a couple little minigames you can play with friends by passing the remote around, among other things. Although you’ll have this handful of options available to you, chances are you’ll stick almost exclusively to the Test room, where you’ll undergo a brain-training exam.
The exam consists of fifteen activities spread out over five categories; Identify, Memorize, Analyze, Compute, and Visualize. Each category will repeat its three activities a few times before moving on to the next one. You’ll be doing actions such as popping balloons with numbers on them in ascending order, remembering certain faces or sequences of sounds and relaying them back to the game, matching up slider or block puzzles, and so on. After going through all five categories, the game will measure the size of your brain in grams based on how often you made mistakes in the activities and how fast you finished the exam. A letter grade also accompanies your score. Amusingly, it will also chart which categories you do best in and assign you career path choices like, “Musician,” “Investor,” and “Adventurer,” among others.
The big problem is that the test repeats the same fifteen activities every single time you take the test, and since you’ll be able to take the test in just a few minutes, there’s not exactly a wealth of content in Wii Degree. There’s an addictive and competitive quality to improving your scores, but it won’t take more than a couple days for most people to achieve a grade in the ‘A’ range. As aforementioned, there’s a few multiplayer minigames to take part in, but almost all of these are just prolonged remixes of activities from single player. A few more spirited competitions exist in the form of a team relay to see who can finish a set of problems first and a mode where you must keep a perfect winning streak, but the remote-passing nature of the multiplayer makes things pretty boring in comparison to the single player.
In the end, there’s nothing inherently wrong with Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree. Its colorful, simple visuals work very well with the game’s all-ages mentality, and although the audio design is flat, it gets the job done. The idea of brain training through different types of memorization and logic exercises is an entertaining one, also. However, its biggest crutch is that there is simply not enough to sustain it; in an hour or two, you’ll witness all there is to see of the game, and unless you don’t mind some pretty serious repetition, a rental is all you’ll need to enjoy the novelty here.