Toki Tori (Wii U) Review

In this new version, Toki Tori still steps out into various environments to rescue his many chick brethren who are yet to be hatched from their eggs, using his many different capabilities to reach every egg in each level of the game and complete them. This, however, is easier said than done, as each level is a mind-teasing side-scrolling puzzle in itself, testing the player's ability to use a limited amount of allowed uses of each move at disposal in each stage.

The concept in itself is now fairly well-known to a lot of Nintendo players who had the chance to sample it before, some of them having yet to find the solution to all the stages in the game all those years later. Therefore, the main show of this new version will lie in all the additions that were introduced in other versions since but which were never put back in the WiiWare version to keep it up-to-date simply because of a lack of resources and WiiWare titles not being so easy to update.

Now, however, Nintendo fans are given the chance to sample the game with most of the additions made since, put back in!

Among them is the rewind function, allowing the player to cancel some of their last actions, "rewinding" time, and try a different approach without having to start the whole stage all over again, which in many cases proves to be an indispensible feature.

Yet another new inclusion, brought over from the smartphone and tablet version of the game, lies in the touch screen controls. Indeed, despite not wanting to include them in Toki Tori 2 originally when it came to Wii U, Two Tribes reincorporated them in this re-release of the game on the Wii U eShop. With this control setup, the player can very easily touch on the screen of the GamePad a spot of the level that is directly accessible to Toki Tori and the little yellow chick will walk there on its own! On Android and iOS devices this would be the only way of moving around, but here the choice is given to either use the touch screen or the built-in buttons, D-Pad and analogue stick, which probably makes this version the most rich in terms of control options and should make all kinds of audiences happy!

Rounding off the package is a new, fifth world that was originally available for the Steam release of the game, introducing an incredible new item to be used to bring some more variety into the mix and allow for even more puzzle ideas that spice things up even further. Those levels, however, won't be directly accessible for older fans to enjoy but apparently have to be unlocked by clearing the four worlds already existing in the previous version, which is a bit unfortunate as these are ultimately what fans of the older game would have wanted to sample in terms of priority. Being offered the choice upon detecting that a WiiWare version of the game had been transferred to the Wii U system would have been a great idea, but perhaps not technically feasible, so complaints cannot really be made, as the truth may never really be known.

Finally, as pointed out above, the game can easily be played on the GamePad alone, without the need of a TV, which brings the game closer to its tablet counterpart. The game can indeed either be played solely on the GamePad with both input types available and the view being more close up to the scene to ensure that the details are still visible on the smaller screen...or solely on the TV but with the view more zoomed out than otherwise and with button controls only.

A third option is a mix of the two previous ones, using the zoomed out view on both screens but allowing a player to use the touch screen controls on the GamePad while other people can easily see the action on the bigger screen! Being given so many choices is something that's certainly considered a wondrous aspect at Cubed3 and Two Tribes deserves to be commended for it!

As was just said, however, the TV gameplay is always very zoomed out, which could make one wonder whether the game is seriously HD, as this could have been used to conceal the fact that the graphic assets are still at the same resolution as they were on WiiWare, but zoomed out more so that the larger space of pixels is completely filled out without any aliasing present. With that being said, though, no aliasing is ever noticeable and the game looks lovely so it's really hard to complain.

Sadly, what didn't make the cut in this Wii U eShop version is the level editor of the PC version, which is really the only thing holding back this latest incarnation from being the most definitive of all.