My observation after the first hour of Tiki Towers was that it has all the trappings of a great casual game, but that the substance of the game is something quite different. For casual gamers, this will be a wolf in sheep's clothing, a game they approach thinking one thing, only to find another. All this stems from the gameplay, not from the interface. The interface is lovely, with easy on-screen navigation and clickable controls that don't require any leaps of faith on the Wii hardware. Seeing more than a small slice of the game world requires a bit of fiddling, but nothing more complicated than moving the camera in any game of this type. Pegging what that means exactly would require comparison to a game like Lemmings or Worms, where the action takes place in one quadrant of a larger level. It would be nice to have everything going on contained to one screen, but the alternate perspective is that your multitasking and planning skills are tested much more as you try to navigate the larger levels.

The design of Tiki Towers is at times very graphic and figurative, with smoke clouds that look like something out of an Asian print, and character designs pushing for laughs. If you haven't figured it out yet, the elite attack force at your disposal during Tiki Towers is comprised solely of monkeys... Animators haven't got everything locked down in game design yet, but they have long known how to make a monkey do hilarious things. I'd venture to say that adding a monkey to any game has a 20% chance of lightening the mood and making gamers chuckle, compared to things like rabbits (2%), bratty kids (7%), line dancing (11%), floozies (15%), or Jar Jar Binks (85%). The enemies are equally mirth-laden, drawn with exaggerated features and over-the-top animations. This is a game with lots of stuff happening at any time, whether it is the activity from your monkeys, attacks from enemies, environmental obstacles, or magical effects. It all comes off smoothly, with no delay evident, and relatively high-quality graphics for the Wii.

Sounds like a keeper, right? The fact is that Tiki Towers does a great deal of stuff well, but it needs to find the right home. The truth about the game is that it fits way more into the Strategy/Puzzle genre than the Casual/Puzzle realm. It is not an easy game to master and not even especially easy to ramp up on the first time you play. What shakes out after playing for some time is that Tiki Towers rewards a patient gamer that likes to think and appreciates a solid challenge. It fits exceptionally well on this platform; even without abusing the motion controls available, it manages to translate concepts that would be intuitive with a mouse on PC quite well to the Wii.

Tiki Towers includes five stages, each containing a series of levels in no apparent order. The levels at least seem to be ordered according to the ascent your monkeys are making as they climb up through the stage to final victory. The first-glance impression of Tiki Towers is likely to be, "Where do I start?" The lack of structure in how the game unfolds makes it hard to approach. The goal of conquering a level and then improving by beating a previous time is the basis for why you'd ever come back and play again, at least by yourself. The Multiplayer Mode contained here is a very nice, cooperative feature that takes advantage of the game's divide between monkeys casting magic and those building structures. Each level begins with a blank slate of sorts, but you can see immediately where towers can be constructed. The title is actually a bit misleading, because some "towers" are really bridges, or bridging constructions that give your monkeys access to other areas. The goal of each level is to climb and exit, avoiding obstacles and enemies along the way. Your team of monkeys can be adjusted on the fly to include more or less of the building variety, compared to the monkeys that gather the "BananaMana" used to trigger magic spells. Some spells are defensive and others will jolt enemies that stand in your way. You don't really control the monkeys at all, other than assigning them jobs, which is where this falls more into the Strategy camp than anything else. An easy way to make this a casual game would be to allow the player to move monkeys AND build towers, but taking the former option away greatly increases the level of challenge.

Many frustrations await the player in Tiki Towers. Monkeys, as most people know, are a bit unpredictable. These will occasionally wander off into hazards throughout the level, and can be put to sleep by the bad chiefs and enemies occupying each level. Trying to control the monkeys is out of the question, so you have to lead them to their destination through a series of instructions on building towers. The speed factor is a problem, since enemies won't wait around for you to build a perfect beauty of a tower. More often, you'll end up with something like that tower in Pisa that leans perilously to one side. Hey, as long as the monkeys can get up the tower and jump to another area, you are good to go. Enemies will hurl magic and even send obstacles down to block your path, and you can respond by firing magic attacks at them, or bolstering your towers. Good old-fashioned construction solutions may be what make the difference in your construction, more than magic. You can have monkeys double-wrap the coconuts that form joints between lengths of bamboo your monkeys harvest for building. Problem is, this takes more time off the clock and exposes you to enemy attack. All the monitoring that is required for success in Tiki Towers is at least as challenging as most resource-driven RTS games, which suggests another way that Tiki Towers could have dialed down its difficulty: Why not make it an option to go turn-based? What's here is what's here, and it's a nice enough package if you are signed on for a real challenge. Playing with a friend can make the management issue easier, since the other players keeps track of casting magic to watch your back or strengthen your towers. It's one heck of a ride, but worth taking if you love the RTS, Strategy genre.

Tiki Towers only has a few icons on the screen, including a menu for casting magic that expands as you roll the cursor over it. For the most part, you'll move your camera around a level and hone in on points for building, then click-and-drag to stretch a length of bamboo from a coconut. The monkeys will automatically tie up another coconut at the end, but it's entirely up to you how the next length of bamboo stretches away from that next joint. Make a good choice and you'll shore up your tower against enemy attacks or spontaneous collapse. Make poor choices and you'll be starting over with a disenchanted team of monkeys. Luckily, the monkeys' morale doesn't drop, but mine sure did at some points during Tiki Towers. There are lots of things to keep track of, even if you're only concerned with building. You can always just draw wild lines out from your coconuts and hope the structure will support your monkeys, but I wouldn't advise that strategy... Better approaches include some planning on diagonal supports, angles, and points of attachment. The physics of Tiki Towers are impressive, as you can end up with a tower that sways or collapses under its own weight. The monkeys add some weight, and certain attacks burden the tower further, making it necessary to think ahead about how to make the strongest tower you can, in the time you have.

The irony of Tiki Towers is that it's great fun to play, under a completely different umbrella than you'd expect from your initial impression. Many folks that don't afford themselves a try-before-buy will be disappointed by the level of challenge in Tiki Towers, thinking of it as some kind of kooky casual game where monkeys climb around on platforms to avoid enemies. Taken for what it is, Tiki Towers delivers the goods, and has more than its share of smart, intuitive controls and gameplay. The option to play with a friend is brilliant, even if it relegates the "other guy" to casting magic. Players looking for something in the realm of Lemmings, combined with a RTS-lite experience, will be thrilled with Tiki Towers, but that's a far slimmer demographic than the typical casual gaming profile. Caveat emptor, and don't say I didn't tell 'ya so!