A Pretender To Snake’s Throne, But Without Progression Or Other Players
I’ve got to be careful with Little Legs. I don’t think I’m on the same page as its developers. We both want it to be different games, and different isn’t necessarily bad.
As someone who has sunk an ungodly amount of time into Snake.io and Snake (mostly at bus stops in the early ‘00s), I’ve arrived at Little Legs with certain expectations. When I see a game featuring snakes growing longer and longer through eating, I expect a few things. My tail should be as threatening to me as to my enemy; it should ideally be multiplayer; and there should be a reason for doing it all, whether that’s a highscore table or a Highlander-esque determination to be the last-snake-standing.
A Snake In The Grass
Little Legs wants none of these things. Initially, that rankled with me, if I am being honest: I didn’t understand what Little Legs was up to. If it wasn’t going to abide by the rules of Snake, then why bother?
I’ve become more sympathetic as time has worn on. Not completely, but a little. I think Little Legs is trying to do something slightly different from my preconceptions.
No matter which millipede-thing you choose, or which arena you settle on, a game of Little Legs plays out the same way. You start as a small millipede and there are loads of larger millipedes around you. That got my back up: why wasn’t this a level-playing field? Why am I immediately disadvantaged? It’s odd, but you just have to recalibrate: it’s like joining a Snake.io game in mid-flow.
So, you move about the arena. Food appears in clusters, so you’re gobbling it up, which in turn makes you longer. Other millipedes might die, and their bodies erupt into deposits of food (I won’t lie, I quite like the idea of a Tesco Express appearing where I die).
Why Can’t You Trip Over Your Own Tail?
A longer tail is traditionally a double-edged thing in this kind of game. While you’re more of an obstacle to other players, you’re also an obstacle to yourself. But Little Legs doesn’t believe in that. You can merrily ride over your own tail, creating figure-eights and tight spirals to avoid getting destroyed.
This felt weird to me. Why would you allow a player to hide in a corner and eat its tail? It breaks the fundamentals of Snake. But of course this isn’t Snake, and Little Legs is more interested in being competitive with other players. Your tail is your weapon, and you are meant to bring it to bear on the other millipedes. This is a game about aggression, rather than being burdened with trying to avoid your own tail. It took me a while to appreciate that.
Killing, or getting killed, also takes some getting used to. There’s the intuitive stuff – hitting an enemy’s side or hitting the sides of the arena means death – but there is the counter-intuitive stuff, too. You can go head-to-head with another millipede and the result feels random. Sometimes you die, sometimes they die, and sometimes you both die. I’m still not completely sure: I think it’s about the angle. If you hit their head with the point of your nose, you win and they explode into food confetti.
It’s counter-intuitive because the size of your snake plays very little part in it. The tiniest snake can headbutt the biggest and win. The size of your snake is only really a factor when filling the arena. You’re making the arena smaller by being bigger. Which, again, took me ages to get: Little Legs is less about eating enemies (which is erratic) and it’s more about encircling them.
A Dash Of Good Thinking
It’s why there is a dash function in Little Legs. You have a short burst of speed on a cooldown, which can leapfrog you ahead of enemies, but can equally send you hurtling towards an enemy you didn’t know about. It’s a neat addition to a reasonably age-worn formula.
Where I stumbled most with Little Legs was the ‘why?’. Why was I doing all of this? I found that motivating myself to play one more game, particularly once the achievements and unlocks were hoovered up, was quite the task.
The biggest motivator would have been multiplayer. Beating friends in couch co-op or online would have been ace. But this is resolutely single-player, presumably because the budget didn’t stretch to it.
By removing other players, a big hole appears in Little Legs. The AI just isn’t good enough: they don’t go in for the kill, and tend to loop around when they could have killed you. Survive beyond them, and more enemies get thrown in – there is no end. And without other players, there’s no global highscore table. You’re beating your own best scores, and that’s it.
Little Legs sorely lacks feelings of progression. You can buy new levels, but they all feel identical. You can buy new millipedes, but they’re cosmetic and cost roughly the same, so you’ll have the one you want near-immediately. The achievements take about thirty minutes to gain. There’s no XP or unlocks. I felt done with Little Legs after roughly an hour. That’s not bad for £3.29, but progression was an open goal that the developers just sort of miss.
And while I eventually calibrated to the game that Little Legs wanted to be – more a game of tripping enemies up than a gobble-a-thon – I wasn’t wholly convinced it was a game worth playing. I’d be ten minutes into a level, looking around, wondering why I was there. What was I achieving? Who was I beating? When would it ever end?
An Ambitious Reinvention Of The Snake Wheel
I’m absolutely a fan of Little Legs’ ambition. It tries to reinvent the Snake.io wheel, and that’s a sizable aim for a budget title. But it turns out that some things are core to this kind of experience: other players, a reason to keep playing, and a sense of threat. Without them, Little Legs begins to eat its own tail.
Important Links
Grow Stronger And Rule The Arena In Little Legs – https://www.thexboxhub.com/grow-stronger-and-rule-the-arena-in-little-legs/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/little-legs/9P3XW1WQF04N/0010
There’s an Xbox One version – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/little-legs-xbox-one/9P5CB2CMVN71/0010
And a Windows PC edition too – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/little-legs-windows/9N8HVKD60ZTB/0010
