Game Reviews

Little Frights

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iOS
| Little Frights
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Little Frights
|
iOS
| Little Frights

"Hello? You'd like me to valiantly battle endless hordes of zombies on tiny rotating worlds? Sounds great! I'll, for some reason, just dig out the least effective weapon possible, which is so puny I'd be better off throwing sand at undead faces instead!"

And so begins the story of 'a badass' having to battle endless waves of ravenous green-skinned, groaning, shuffling semi-corpses for… reasons.

He can move left! He can move right! He can shoot, using his pitiful pistol that takes a dozen shots to down a single foe! He can't - irritatingly - do both at the same time!

He can also jump, ostensibly to avoid zombie death, but more often than not he'll just leap at random, to the point where escape abruptly transforms into getting torn to shreds! Oops.

Out of control

For the most part, the controls are to blame. It's not often you sit there with an iPhone thinking, "Man, I wish this game had virtual on-screen buttons", but here we are.

Little Frights tries to be clever, with you swipe-dragging left and right to move, swiping up to jump, and holding the screen to blast the undead.

But it utterly fails, because too often you'll be blasting your way through wave 7 on maximum health and the tiniest movement will find your badass becoming a bad brunch instead.

It's a pity, because although there's not a whiff of innovation here (Zombies! Run left and right! Shoot things!), the execution is nonetheless rather good. The music is quite nice, and the graphics are very smart indeed.

The cartoonish mini-worlds your idiot gunman sprints around are detailed, and surprisingly cheerful for scenes of post-apocalyptic destruction. Now and again, bats will suddenly explode from the scenery, or fog will subtly envelop you, adding some semblance of spooky atmosphere.

Little upgrades

Control issues aside, the game could have been saved had there been more to do. But all you get beyond basic shooty larks is a randomised weapon-drop system.

If you can spot and get to a glowing firearm, you'll have a few thrilling seconds of obliterating everything in your path, sometimes via amusing means such as a prayer book that shines heavenly light on the undead.

Frustratingly, drops are rare, and the game doesn't bother to indicate where the nearest one is. Once you're past the first few waves, it's therefore more sensible to stand your ground and shoot everything that moves rather than risk searching for a power-up that might be lurking.

Naturally, there's also a currency system in place. Shoot zombies and you collect bones. These can be spent on upgrading your health, the quality and frequency of drops, jump height, and speed.

As much fun as you might have after a few upgrades, lasering the face off of everything that moves with Flash Gordon's ray gun, the badass will inevitably at some point randomly jump into a group of zombies.

You'll fume a bit, think he deserved a bit of disembowelling, and realise the thematically similar and far superior Minigore series exists, which you can trot off and play instead.

Little Frights

Fairly bland but nicely illustrated shooty zombie shenanigans, largely wrecked by dreadful controls and an inevitably dispiriting upgrade system
Score
Craig Grannell
Craig Grannell
Craig gets all confused with modern games systems with a million buttons, hence preferring the glass-surfaced delights of mobile devices. He spends much of his time swiping and tilting (sometimes actually with a device), and also mulling why no-one’s converted Cannon Fodder to iPad.