Try as he might, the fat (he's not fat, he's just big boned - Ed) little chicken Toki Tori seems to have been having a bit of an awkward time getting his cute little puzzle game released on the Wii U. Originally planned to launch alongside Nintendo's Wii U back in November, the game first got pushed back to the 20th of December, before being delayed indefinitely whilst the team at Two Tribes worked tirelessly to make the game bigger and better, and polish up the much vaunted level creator, which will let you make your own levels from scratch, and share them with the world. After much waiting, though, it seems the little yellow chicken is ready to fly, with the game set to hit the Wii U eShop next week - although we're not going to count our chickens before they're hatched quite yet.
Essentially a puzzle game, Toki Tori 2 sees you navigating the fat fowl though a series of worlds, making smart use of his limited moveset - a stomp and a whistle - to affect the creatures and the environment to help you progress. For example, there's birds that can lift the diminutive chicken up into the air, frogs that can encase him in bubbles and make him float, and a giant lobster with a log on its back that acts like a moving platform - each one spurred into action by either one of your moves. It's a bit different to it's predecessor, in which you had to collect a series of eggs scattered round a maze in precisely the right order, with help from a number of items, but that's not necessarily a bad thing - with a more open world to explore, packed with hidden collectables and secret areas, we can see Toki Tori 2 keep us busy for a long time.
Why he can't fly himself, we're not sure.
What's slightly less encouraging is the eye-popping price, with the game set to hit the eShop at a hefty £12.99 next Thursday the 4th of April. Early birds can get a 10% discount, which brings it down to £11.69, although there's no word on how long the promotion will last - so if you need a little fat chicken in your life, you might want to get in quick. With one of the game's developers recently confirming it took them around ten hours to play through - and they knew exactly where they had to go, and what to do next, there's certainly set to be plenty to puzzle over here - although that price does leave us a little bit less enthusiastic than we were.
We've always been reluctant to spend over a tenner on a downloadable game, and while we know it comes with all sorts of new features, the price hike does seem a little bit extreme - especially when you consider the last game was half that price, at about £6.30ish. With developers apparently able to set their own price point, and receiving a larger share of the sales on the Wii U eShop that on other similar stores, it's more than a tad disappointing to see this coming in at such a high price, when it would have been an insta-buy had it been that little bit cheaper. Here's hoping for a demo, so we can try before we buy.
