TOSS N GO Review (Wii U eShop)

Simplicity is never a bad thing in itself. An experience can be extremely easy in execution, yet still provide plenty of rewarding elements. Sometimes, however, something can be boiled down into such simple elements that it loses some of those satisfying quirks, and that's where RCMADIAX's TOSS N GO suffers.

TOSS N GO is another in the developer's line of inexpensive, tabletop-inspired adaptations, a la SHUT THE BOX and POKER DICE SOLITAIRE FUTURE. The game this time around is classic push-your-luck dice rolling in its purest form.

Two players (one controlled by the CPU if flying solo) take turns rolling 10 dice in a race to 100 points. Each die carries three different symbols - a green plus counts as a point and is auto-saved, a yellow circle counts as nothing, but seeing one means you can roll again. The red X is what you really have to watch out for: if all the remaining unsaved dice on a follow up roll come up red, your turn immediately ends and any points accumulated therein are lost.

The entirety of the game focuses around what you roll and deciding when to end your turn. You are free to bow out and bank your acquired points after any roll. If you manage to get all 10 of your dice green, you have those 10 points and get to roll all 10 again. Roll all red at any time, though, and you end that turn with a big, fat zero no matter what. This makes having only one or two dice left a risky decision; you're so close to getting all your dice back, but are just as likely to go bust.

That's the entirety of TOSS N GO. You and a potential human competitor will only ever have two buttons to hit on the GamePad: “Toss Dice" or “Save Points" - there may be a bit of tactical decision-making at times, but the majority of the game is up to luck. This unfortunately leads to a game that may initially serve as a quick diversion, but doesn't possess much substance to hold one's interest. It would perhaps be more interesting to have a variant that allows you more control or influence over what you do with the dice - as it stands, it often feels like the game plays itself.

The presentation is reasonable, but also lacks any bells and whistles that might make it more memorable. One of the most entertaining parts of a game with so many dice is having the tactile thrill of actually holding and rolling them across a table, watching them clatter every which way; the dice in TOSS N GO don't even have a rolling animation, sadly - the symbols just cycle neatly on each black square. The music has a nice electronic beat and is certainly worth listening to, but the same one track looping over and over might get tiring after a while - if the gameplay doesn't get you first.