From famed developer Two Tribes who are responsible for the sublime Toki Tori series comes an entry from their 'Classics' series: EDGE - first developed by Mobigame - has already found popularity on other platforms including smartphones, which you would think wouldn't necessarilly mean that a title like this would be a priority for the Wii U. It seems that the developer thinks otherwise, having gone the extra mile to bring this simple title, complete with all DLC, to Nintendo's home console for the low price of £1.79 on the eShop until the New Year. Personally I think they would do well to keep the title at the initial launch price, but ultimately it's still cheap for the amount of content that's provided for you to play, so this is something that will still be just about viable when the price increases to £3.59 in 2014 if you're into puzzle platform titles.

Essentially this title starts out being simple enough. You control a cuboid as you navigate stages made up of cubes which are the same size. Your task is to make it from the start to the end square, collecting all the 'blocks' that you can find along the way, which will affect your grade for the stage - also dependant on how fast you completed it - which ranges from 'D' all the way up to 'S+' so you may want to keep playing until you attain all those ranks, which could take you a while. The controls are solid enough as you can opt to use either the left stick or the d-pad - I found the stick easier in this instance - but because everything is shown from an isometric viewpoint you will find that you will need to press diagonally in order to go 'up', but once you get past this then all is well.

You can collect power-ups along the way, some of which will propel you forward but the best one is the multi-coloured square on the ground that transforms you into a mini-cuboid, enabling you to travel up many blocks. When you are the standard size you can only move between or over blocks if two sides of your 'cube' are touching the block you are attempting to traverse. The only exception are blocks that have a neon outline, which you can stick to in a variety of ways. Sometimes they will be moving though, so you've got to be careful that you don't fall off the stage which will incur a penalty. I won't even make any attempt to understand the physics of this title because they probably don't make complete sense, but then this is designed mainly just to be a 'timesink' so it's probably best not to think too hard about it.

There are forty-eight Normal stages for you to get stuck into, which do get rather challenging are you progress through them, plus forty-four extended stages which are basically the standard ones tweaked with an extra layer of difficulty. If that's not enough, you also get seventeen bonus stages that are also worth checking out. While the title is perfectly playable, there are times when you might run into difficulty or feel like a particular stage is unfair. I'm not entirely convinced that how the game is put together is entirely perfect, there does seem to be a few flaws present, but nothing that can't be perseveered with if you are inclined to finish everything; you do get a mini-map to help when you can't see your 'character' at least.

Visually the solid shapes, bold colours and straight edges all presented in an isometric view do make for a rather striking balance, which is always rather pleasing but never really extends beyond that, needless to say it does look nicer on the Wii U than it will have done on any other format though which is a plus. The audio sounds a lot stronger however as there are plenty of decent chip-tunes used throughout the entire experience which elevates things somewhat. Sound effects are also solid enough and never prove to be annoying like in some similar games.

Ultimately I think you do get what you pay for with a lot of games, at the moment EDGE offers a decent experience for its early price-tag. Of course it will still be worth picking up later down the line but I would advise anyone
interested in EDGE to pick it up now as you're really getting value for money here. How long the game will last you though depends entirely on how much you wish to persever with it. Many players will be happy blasting through it just to see all the stages which could be done in a couple of sittings, but if you wish to go for all the ranks however then good luck as you will probably need it, but you will certainly get more than your money's worth provided you can stick with the challenge to the end.