Little Critter Hunters Steam Demo Review
Verdict: Play
A hero-swap wave-clearer where quests, not gold, gate the skill tree, and I finished the whole demo in one and a half ho
Little Critter Hunters got me through the whole demo in one and a half hours. Every hero maxed, every skill tree unlocked, every stage cleared. It is a hero-swap wave-clearer where you cycle a red swordsman, a green archer, and a blue wizard on one button to wipe out critters before the timer runs out. The honest thing that stuck with me is that gold never bit. Quests were the real limiter.
My verdict is a Play. I finished the whole demo in one and a half hours with every hero maxed and every stage cleared, and the one thing I want tighter before the full game is the gold. Tighter gold would make the three-card upgrade choice bite, which is the strategy pull the loop already wants. Everything else is there. The hero-swap on one button, the specials-cycle damage push, the quest-gated skill trees, the chest bonus, the readable pixel art. Full game is not dated yet. When it comes out I want more stages, more heroes to rotate in and out, and a skill tree that asks me to choose. Demo is on the Steam page now.
Pros
- Cycling a red swordsman, a green archer and a blue wizard on one button plays like one hero with three ability sets
- Running all three specials back to back was the fastest way I found to clear a wave, and the buff cards let a small build form around it
- Pixel art is simple but readable and the swings and hits carry real weight
Cons
- Gold pours in fast, so I stopped reading the three upgrade cards per level in the middle of the demo and just bought them all
The three heroes
You start with a little red dude with a big sword. A green dude who shoots arrows unlocks next, then a blue dude who is a wizard. There is a fourth gold-worm hero you never control that just adds passive boosts on top.
One button switches between the three you do control, and you switch as often as you want mid-battle. That felt like the strategic decision going in, but after a few stages it plays like one hero with three ability sets rather than three separate heroes to manage. Swings come out in the direction you are pointing, so aim carries more of the moment-to-moment weight than the switch does. That is the shape of the whole Action loop.
Each hero has their own special with their own cooldown timer. When I wanted to output damage in a hurry I would run through all three specials one after the other, red then green then blue, and it clears crowds faster than any single hero can. Between stages you also get to pick one of three random buff cards. Lone Wolf gives more attack if you never switch, Snowflake stacks chain-kills if you keep the combo going, and Venom Fang piles more damage on the poison the archer already puts down. Cards give the Hack and Slash push a light build to chase across each run.
Quests as the gate
There is a skill tree per hero. You buy the upgrades with gold you earn from stages. A jump slam for the red swordsman, more attack, quicker swing speed, quicker cooldowns. What is interesting is that each rung of the tree is not unlocked by gold. It is unlocked by completing an in-game quest.
Kill thirty of a certain critter. Do five thousand damage. Use an ability ten times. I always had enough gold to buy every upgrade I had unlocked, so I stopped reading the three cards per level around the middle of the demo and just bought them. Where I got stuck was the quests, and getting them ticked off before I could touch the next rung.
Power creep and stage design
The power creep sits alongside the difficulty of the stages. You do not turn into a demigod. You keep pace with what the game is throwing at you. I only felt the creep when I had to go back to early forest stages with the wizard, who I had barely been using, to farm a kill-count quest. On those early stages the wizard was destroying them, and I felt a lot more powerful than I did in the later stages I had come from. Clearing later stages also pays more gold, so once a stage locks in you push forward rather than farm the old ones.
Some stages put a river across the middle with enemies on the far side, which is where the ability picks matter. The archer hits from range, the wizard has medium range, or you take a jump ability and cross the river yourself. Sunflower enemies were the other thing that stuck with me from the later stages. Not dangerous exactly, but bullet sponges you whack for ages before the HP bar comes down.
If there is time left on the timer at the end of a stage you sometimes get a chest bonus, which is an Arcade beat where you can attack a chest for ages and the more damage you put on it the more gold falls out.
Visuals and feel
It is very simple 2D pixel graphics and it does the job. You can read every critter on the map, what it is and roughly what it can do.
The battle feedback is the part that surprised me. The swings and the ability hits feel like they are connecting, and for a Casual pixel wave-clearer that is more than you need it to be doing.
Developer: KemiStudio
View on Steam
Tags: Action, Casual, Arcade, Hack and Slash, Indie
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