Brain training is all the rage these days, and that's mainly the fault of the handheld Nintendo DS, with its popular 'Brain Age' game. This encourages you to partake of various tests as a daily mental exercise schedule, in an effort to turn your brain from a giant grey pudding into a toned cerebral athlete.

It was never going to be long before similar programs appeared on different formats, like this PC-based Mindscape effort. The idea is that you play it on a daily (or as near as possible) basis, and the package plots your scores on a progress graph so you can see how you're shaping up, just like the DS version.

The tests themselves are divided into five categories - logic, memory, numerical, spatial and verbal - each of which contains three exercises, for a grand total of fifteen. As is often the case with this sort of program, they rather vary in quality.

Some are reasonably compelling and fun, such as 4 Colour, a spatial game which challenges you to fill in a grid of rectangles with four different colours, and no adjacent rectangles are allowed to be the same colour. It's a good test of mental agility, especially considering you're working against the clock for the best possible score: all the scoring is based on time taken as well as accuracy.

The memory games are enjoyable but not original, including a "Simple Simon" sequence recall test and a pairs memory grid (in which you have to turn over pairs of cards and match them up). Some other old favourites also incorporated into the program are Sudoku (in the logic category) and word searches (verbal). The former is decent but the latter a little dull.

The other verbal tests aren't great either. The spelling challenge is passable, offering up three different spellings of a word to choose from. Recognising and clicking on the correct one at speed isn't easy. The reading exercise, however, simply asks you to read a passage as fast as you can and then click 'done', which is rather tedious and unimaginative.

Boredom is a problem that the numerical section also suffers from, to a degree, as it just revolves around basic sums and sequences. Well, it is maths after all, but it could have been given a slightly more colourful flavour.

These tests are pretty easy on the lower levels, but challenging later on, although the interface can frustrate: when you drag and drop a multiplication symbol into a sum, for example, it doesn't always register properly. That can be pretty irritating when it ruins your attempt at breaking your fastest time record.

The whole package suffers from lacklustre presentation and there's none of the sense of fun or polish that the Nintendo DS trainer provides. Mindscape's Brain Trainer may help sharpen up your faculties, if used regularly, but it's a decidedly average effort featuring some rather poor exercises and interface design.

If you plug away with the daily exercises, they'll probably hone your mental acuity to some extent (use it or lose it, as they say). It's a shame that the presentation and some of the exercises are on the poor side.