A Sudoku magazine will set you back about £1.50 these days and will provide a good 5-7 hours of cover-to-cover time wasting based amusement mixed with pure frustration at your own inability to solve even the simplest of brainteasers. Enter Toki Tori 3DS, the new challenger for the crown of the average commuter’s attention. For the laughably low price of £1.79 / 2 Euros, the big, fat, genderless yellow bird is back on Nintendo consoles, and this time he / she / it’s in 3D.

Those who have played any of the previous versions in the series, will be well versed in how Toki Tori 3D works. A platform-based-puzzle game, Toki Tori presents the gamer with collecting a certain number of eggs in each cleverly designed stage. To achieve this, Toki Tori has a range of special abilities it can use in order to warp on through to the next stage. It can teleport (the equivalent of 2 feet), suck up enemies Luigi’s mansion style with a hoover, build bridges, among other amusing things. Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong, often these abilities are often limited in each level, so a great amount of thinking is required to tackle the specific requirements of each stage. It doesn’t help that the little blighter can’t even jump, instead it can only fruitlessly flap its embarrassingly undersized wings to gently ‘float’ to the ground.

Slime! That doesn't look like it will wash out of our feathered friend so easily.

The experience, as you may be able to gather, can at times be massively frustrating. The puzzles are exceptionally tricky every so often, with some stages requiring a good 20 minutes of constant failure before the path to victory presents itself to your gamer’s eye. This though is where much of the reward lies in the game. The sense of achievement when you finally beat a level is overwhelming. Unexpected fist-pumps will accompany that oh-so-sweet but oh-so-rarely heard victory music.

Occasionally, some of these frustrations will be down to the game’s control. While for the most part navigating Toki Tori is fairly solid, movements that are more precise can sometimes prove tricky. Switching abilities is assigned to the shoulder buttons, with A being your context-sensitive action button. Movement is handled by either the thumbpad or D-pad, though there were a couple of instances where climbing ladders and placing Toki Tori in an exact position was difficult, I found myself constantly flipping between both control methods, not being completely satisfied with either. Fortunately, this occurs rather seldom, and for the most part the controls are adequate, if not excellent.

This looks like a fine spot to use as a peaceful perch... I'm sure I'm meant to be doing something.

To combat the frustration levels, the developers at Two Tribes have included two really great features – a rewind function and a ‘wildcard’ function. The rewind function is pretty self-explanatory: on any level, at any time, you can hit the Y button to rewind back either a few steps, or to the start. This saves swathes of time, as you don’t have to do everything from the beginning again. For example, if you were simply killed through carelessness or by and enemy, you can just go back a few paces and try that section again. It’s also handy if you realise you’ve gone wrong somewhere in the middle of the stage and only need to go back to that specific part.

The wildcard function allows you to skip one level and move on to the next. So, if you’re ever really stuck, you can tell the level you’re stuck on to “do one,” and attempt the next (admittedly, probably even harder) stage. You can only use one of these though! In order to make progress in the game, you have to complete every level but one, though this one stage can change providing you finish the previously wild-carded stage. It is a good system providing some respite from those stages, which really are just too tricky.

There are four worlds to plough through (Forest, Castle, Sewer and Bubble Barrage), which contain both the main levels and a rage-inducing “hard mode”. In addition, each world has a couple of bonus levels, granted once the rest are completed. Each world comes with its own unique aesthetic and looks nice on the 3DS’ screen, even if the 3D admittedly doesn’t add much to the experience. The first couple of worlds are easily doable in the space of ah hour, but the rest of the game can take much, much more than that. All-in-all there are around 100 levels, which is certainly a major plus given the price of the game.

Come on Toki Tori! It's time to defeat Dracula... erm I mean, rescue your family!

Graphically the game doesn’t break any boundaries, adopting a standard SNES era 2D style which is bright and colourful to look at. The music is also standard fare, nicely up-beat in the menus and more atmospheric during gameplay sections. It doesn’t detract from the experience, though on the other hand doesn’t enhance it all that much. The music which plays when you die can get annoyingly tiresome, given the frequency with which it happens.

Toki Tori 3D is a fun little puzzle / platformer. Fans of the series will be right at home with this edition and those new to the series should be enticed by the attractive price point. For the price of a Sudoku or crossword book, there is a lot on offer here and should have any gamer’s attention for at least 4 or 5 hours. The pick up and play aspect complements the 3DS’ portable nature, with levels generally taking about 2 or 3 minutes to finish (if you know what you’re doing, of course). It’s difficult not to recommend Toki Tori 3D in this regard, because even if you don’t like it or you find it too challenging, you’re still getting more for your money than if you were to purchase a Hello Kitty 3DS theme.