Little Walker is a Mario-like adventure with its own quirks and unique charms. You play as Little Walker, a walker who walks (and jumps) to save the world. Besides the great platforming, Little Walker oozes with goofiness from start to end.
Positive:
Simply charming. The game looks great, the sound track is nice, and everything is so… silly. The manual, dialogue, characters, enemies, settings, and wearing a boot on your head. Everything is so goofy, but in the best way possible.
Fluid and responsive controls, especially when it came to jumping. The controlled slow decent (holding jump while falling), is something I’m usually not so fond of, but worked very well in this game. However, bouncing on balloons doesn’t seem to always work.
Inclusion of training and game manual were a nice touch. The manual is informative, but more importantly, hilarious, while the training is very helpful for players that might not be great at platforming.
Plenty of little secrets and collectibles (pulsms). I particularly liked the weirdos and the mushroom/Mario reference. You also get to see how many pulsums are available and how many you already collected in the area select screen, which is very helpful for those who want to complete the game.
Decently challenging. I did not try the auto-walk mode but I played Little Walker on hard, and found that some segments were quite tough. The dragon riding segment, for example, is very unforgiving. I found that the checkpoints and health placements were quite fair, especially because you have the revive mechanism (spam jump when on 0 HP). Regardless, I had to replay some segments a few times before getting it right. I did find that the final boss was quite easy though, which was quite the anti-climax.
Negative:
You can only see your health directly after a hit or a heal. I figure this could be annoying to some players, but the developers actually address this in the game manual/book: “You have to remember the amount. All part of the game, Sally!” If you pay attention to the character’s face, you will notice that he becomes more sad the lower his HP drops, so you could always use that as an indicator.
Everything else in the game is very polished, so the simplistic main menu and pause screens stood out like sore thumbs. It currently looks a little sloppy and not very user friendly. It also bothered me that I had to press the camera-looking button on the main menu to activate my controller, rather than the controller being usable immediately. I ended up playing with a keyboard and only noticed this button after completing the game.
Conclusion:
★★★✬☆ Goofy Goodness
Little Walker is a great 2D platformer for a fair price (expect about 3 hours of gameplay). Despite the oversaturation of the 2D platformer genre, I feel like Little Walker managed to find its own niche and stand out from the crowd. I thoroughly enjoyed the cute graphics, goofy content, and fun gameplay. There is not much else to say besides I hope to see more of Little Walker in the future.
