Sight Training: Enjoy Exercising and Relaxing Your Eyes - Nintendo DS review

Full Review

First there was Brain Training, now Nintendo want to help you improve your sight, but can the idea work? We get our eyes in training to find out.

Simplicity is the key here and Sight Training, or Flash Focus as it will be known in America, follows the same formula as the company's Brain Training offering.

The idea is that with daily exercises you can improve your eye sight, helping you perform better in sport or daily life. Nintendo acknowledge that it won't reverse any decline in your eye sight and certainly won't help you read an eye chart better, but it will supposedly help you hone what skills you have already.

Based on a daily approach, you are given recommended training everyday to help improve your eyesight.

Beyond the recommended training, Sight Training allows you to opt for additional custom training and once a day you can complete the Eye Test to see what your eye age is (mine's currently a shocking 40, 10 years older than I am).

The tests themselves have been designed to test a number of different eye skills and focus on variants of five main areas; Dynamic Visual Acuity, Momentary Vision, Eye Movement, Peripheral Vision and Hand-Eye Coordination.

Before you think that just five games will be rather short-lived and dull, these are the overall skills you are learning and there actually stacks of games based on this from tracking a circle under a box, to seeing if you can remember a series of numbers that are shown to you for a spilt second.

As the game progresses you then unlock further games. Get past the core training games and you are offered sports games. These test multiple skills at any one time. Everything from playing table tennis to test your Dynamic Visual Acuity, Eye Movement and Hand-Eye Coordination to playing Baseball that tests just your Dynamic Visual Acuity and Hand-Eye Coordination.

With up to four people allowed to be keeping track of their eye quality from one copy of the game you'll soon find you'll be challenging others in your house, and rather than get excited about reaching the end of a level, here it's all about proving you have a better eye age than every one around you.

Because of that, like Brain Training there is only really 10 minutes of play at any one time. Once you've completed your recommended training for the day, done your eye exercises, perhaps opted for some more custom training and then tested your eyes there is no more left to do but turn off the console and do something else.

Verdict

Look at Sight Training like a game and you will be disappointed, however if you look at it as a training tool to improve your vision and you'll want to snap this title up quick.

Like Brain Training, Sight Training is 10 minutes of quick fun everyday that proves video games can be helpful, rather than just insisting you kill everything in sight.

So after a week can I see better? I think it's too early to tell, but something I have noticed, and this could be completely coincidental, is that my ability to remember numbers has improved.

• Comment on this story for your chance to win a TomTom XL Live IQ Routes Europe