Little Soldiers

Platformers usually rely on your coordination and reflexes, although they also challenge your mind from time to time, through the use of puzzles. In the game at hand, however, these puzzles are slightly more predominant than they would be in a classic arcade platformer, although the riddles themselves are also far simpler and intuitive, which kind of balances things out.

Little Soldiers starts out innocently enough with a few tutorial stages, which aim to teach you the basic controls and mechanics. Right off the bat, you might notice that you have to use the mouse instead of the keyboard or a dedicated controller, which clearly indicates the fact that the action is not as fast paced as it would be in a classic arcade title. On the other hand, this gives you more time to carefully plan and execute your route.

In order to move, you have to click on the location you want your soldier to run to. The same thing happens when you want to jump, plant explosives or just shoot your gun. Hence, a lot of excitement just got dropped from the equation, but it was replaced with a satisfactory feeling of achievement that rushes over you at the end of the level, since you can only do it by being patient and calculated, both of which are virtues in their own right.

As the tutorial slowly comes to an end and the levels become harder and harder to complete, you might start to notice the fact that the environments are very small and crowded, while sometimes it can even be too confusing to make out what happens. The background textures are usually to blame for this, although it is not always the case and it you can sometimes really enjoy tackling a specific stage, due to the decor.

On the other hand, the mouse-based controls can manage to remain annoying all the way to the end, since it is very counter-intuitive to jump by simply clicking on a specific patch of land. The dull mechanics can be rather difficult to swallow sometimes, since they are liable to become boring after you figure out exactly how to make proper use of them and just spend a few seconds examining the level before deciding on the course.

In the end, Little Soldiers could have stumbled into a gold mine, if the gameplay managed to remain interesting all the way through. The challenging stages and the funny theme of the game might have yielded positive results, but it is rather difficult to stay focused when you consider the weird control scheme.