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The scale of each level is beautifully tuned in order to maximise addiction. The compact, often single-screen stages always give you an overview of the bigger picture, meaning that you’ll never feel over-faced. And the rationing of the items is often designed to give you only marginally less that you need to make the level a walkover and just enough to make it seem impossible, particularly in the later stages.
You’ll always feel like the nailing of the level is tantalisingly close, even when your approach is miles off, and when you do find the right solution you’ll often discover it to be painfully obvious in hindsight. Hard puzzles that pretend to be easy, easy puzzles that pretend to be hard, and the whole lot wrapped up in the kind of classic, simple to grasp 16-bit style platforming that made the SNES and Amiga days such a joy.
It’s a concentrated formula for “Just one more go” syndrome. Throw in a cleverly implemented 'wild card' system which allows you to skip a level if you're stuck but makes you return to complete it if you want to skip another one, and you've essentially got a videogame crack house run by a smiling cartoon chicken. For 900 Wii points - about £6:50 - it doesn't get much better than that.
Negatives? Not too many. The motion-controlledpoint and click interface is rather too fiddly and imprecise to be of much use, but given the presence of a more traditional – and much more comfortable - Nunchuk option, that really isn’t a problem. Other than that any issues you might have will just come from the peripheral stuff. Depending on your gaming heritage you'll either love the soundtrack or switch it straight off and pretend you never came into contact with its horrors, and yourappreciation of Toki Tori's visual presentation may also depend on your tolerance for old school 2D gaming.
But aside from those considerations - and they really are mostly just matters of personal aesthetic taste - Toki Tori does what it does as well as you could ask it to. Fun, clever, friendly and rewarding, it will stimulate the old noggin without ever feeling like hard work. And that's exactly what puzzle games should do.
