Little Frights Review

For being both yet another endless wave shooter AND another zombie game (Developers: can we figure out whatever the next big thing is and move on to it already? Cyborg ninja? Cowboy monkeys maybe?), Little Frights has a lot of visual charm going for it. Unfortunately charm alone can’t carry a game to greatness on its shoulders, but it certainly try its best.

Little Frights, as I've said, is a wave-based survival shooter where players try their best to stay alive - blah blah blah, undead hordes, yadda yadda, aim for the head, etc, etc. You don’t need me to explain zombie tropes to you at this point. The nameless protagonist wanders around the outside of the game world’s rotating, stylized globe while collecting currency in the form of bones from dispatched zeds. These bones can be cashed-in to purchase weapons in-game, or banked following death into a pool to pay for stat and ability upgrades.

The art style is really the star of the show here, with characters that are cartoonish and cute in a super-deformed kind of way that's only enhanced by the abstraction of the compressed, spherical game world. It’s also fun to note that each different weapon type triggers its own specific death animation, many of which are still cute and amusing (if gruesome). It’s a nice touch. Having a bit more variety in the enemies would have been good, though. The music is also very well done, if a touch repetitive.

Where Little Frights struggles the hardest is with its controls. Players can tap just about anywhere on the screen to maneuver, with a horizontal swipe and hold controlling walking, an upward swipe for jumping, and a tap and hold without swiping to fire weapons. The “anywhere you like” idea seems great in theory, but in practice it doesn’t quite hold up. Sometimes you accidentally move when you want to stand still and fire. Sometimes jumps don’t go off as planned when you're trying to escape getting pinned in from both sides by zombies. Really, a virtual d-pad and buttons seem like the obvious way to go here. It’s such a small thing, but it impacts the overall experience so much that it can’t be ignored.

Beyond the controls, just a handful of small niggling details hamper making Little Frights a more engagingly spooky time. Enemies often spawn almost underneath the player, leaving them to fight with the controls to get away in time. Also, although a certain amount of grinding is expected, the gradually-increasing upgrade prices mean sitting through a lot of slow-to-develop early game (the first wave is a single enemy) to earn enough bones to make later playthroughs less painful... and that would be if the core game itself wasn’t such a shallow experience to begin with.

Much like the zombie apocalypse itself, Little Frights is a lot of fun to look at but not quite so fun once you’re actually in the thick of it.