Chicken Wiggle review
Chicken Wiggle marks the first for Japanese Nintendo in being a review for a game not currently available in Japan! Chicken Wiggle is the latest game from Atooi and its mastermind Jools Watsham who is perhaps better known to Nintendo fans as the creator of Mutant Mudds. Similarly to Mutant Mudds, Chicken Wiggle is a retro inspired platformer.
The storyline is simple enough – rescue eight chicken friends from eight separate towers that have been captured by a witch. It’s quite apparent that in both art and story direction that Chicken Wiggle harks back to the days of Jools’s childhood and of the classic British home computer, the ZX Spectrum with the gameplay mechanics not all that far removed.
Fortunately, Chicken Wiggle’s design isn’t overly reliant on being faithful to the limitations imposed by the Spectrum and looks to many 2D Super Mario games for inspiration with elements of the three Super Mario Lands in the story mode and especially Super Mario Maker in the game’s construction mode which are both found on the game’s title screen: Play, Create, Share.
Play is the story mode that sees you control both the Chicken and his/her Worm companion (they are joined at the hip so to speak) with the Worm working almost like Yoshi’s tongue and able to stretch to distant platforms and the Chicken being the standard left, right and jump. The mode is intuitive and introduces plenty of new elements into all of its 48 levels.
Create is where the game begins to offer value for money if you invest the time. Anyone who has played Super Mario Maker should know what to expect, and just like the game’s story mode; is relatively intuitive with the icons pretty self-explanatory. Once created, you can go to Share to both share with other players and to download others’ creations.
Conclusion
Overall, Chicken Wiggle is a solid platformer that seldom reaches the heights of the games it is largely inspired by, but the added Creation mode really takes it to the next level. The story mode maybe completed within a few hours but being able to both create and download additional levels puts it just behind the top tier of platform games on 3DS.
Review copy kindly supplied to us by Atooi.
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