Little Firefighter
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| Little Firefighter

Everyone loves a firefighter. Men secretly wish they could be one so they can spray a giant hose about the place and throw grateful women over their shoulder. Women just fancy them.

(Proof of that latter point - I was once standing watching the office I'd just been working in burn to the ground, and when the fire engines turned up there was an audible groan from the women in the gathered crowd when they saw the firemen were all a bit old and podgy. Never mind they'd come to risk their lives putting out the flames. Women clearly would prefer they were just lust-objects on speed dial.)

So, firefighters are popular - but is a little firefighter as good?

To explain, Little Firefighter is a game about a little boy - called Tobi - who dreams of being a firefighter. Quite literally, because one night his dreams take him to Fire Dreamland where his toy fire engine Dandy has come to life and Flame Warriors and Firelings are setting the place alight.

It's safe to say this isn't a very realistic firefighting simulation - there are no chavs setting light to phone boxes or people with second degree burns running around screaming here.

Just like real flames, Little Firefighter builds up gradually. In the early levels you're simply tasked with dousing out flames by pressing '5' to attach your hose to a fire hydrant then holding the same button to spray water (the longer you hold it, the farther your jet of water shoots).

But as the game progresses, the heat is notched up and increasingly more elements are chucked into the cooking pot. Little Firelings start running amok about the place, knocking down your health if you let them get too close, while your inventory of firefighting items grows, offering you portable fire extinguishers, frost bombs, energy drinks and more.

Flame warriors act as sorts of boss characters you hit with water until their health gauges are emptied. And if all of this sounds like hard work that's because it is, since you're working against a time limit that's ticking away in the corner of the screen as well.

Little Firefighter has originality in bucketfuls. It's incredibly sweet too - you only have to consider it has a talking fire engine and a little boy who's fallen asleep and been teleported to a land full of dancing fire imps to reach that conclusion.

It's also a lot of fun to play, with the only small criticism being that its levels are a bit repetitive. There are different objectives but these really revolve around either putting out fires or collecting boxes that have been scattered about.

But Little Firefighter is still a little gem of a game. A special mention should go to how satisfying it is turning barren wasteland into luscious green fields by spraying your hose about (we told you it wasn't realistic).

It doesn't have a hard enough difficulty level to offer much of a challenge to seasoned gamers. In fact, some levels give you enough health that you can run through the flames and collect items without so much as fighting a fire or breaking into a sweat. But for younger gamers or those just after something a bit different, it's great. Provided you're not a lady who's going to be upset there's no fireman totty to ogle, of course.

Little Firefighter

Cute and original fire-fighting game with levels and levels of flame-dousing fun. It's like (a scaled down) Super Mario Sunshine with fire
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Kath Brice
Kath Brice
Kath gave up a job working with animals five years ago to join the world of video game journalism, which now sees her running our DS section. With so many male work colleagues, many have asked if she notices any difference.