Little Critters does many things right. It minds the little details. The game is frenetic, accessible, and fun. And it just works, in the way Steve Jobs famously described the magic of early iPhone devices. But better than a casual iPhone time-killer for the subway… this “tower defense” game brings the tower home.What if the tower in “tower defense” is your living room?In 2025, tower defense games often use more established formulas than wider innovations.Start: Few weapons, small horde.Progress: Add weapons, upgrades, and enemies.Endgame: Complex weapon combos, enormous hordes, chaos!Little Critters’ core innovation is its point of view: you're not an omniscient invisible presence up above; you’re on the ground next to the tower. Enemies don’t attack from just 360 degrees - you’ll need to prepare fully spherical defense coverage as hordes crawl from below and swoop from up high.It deftly leverages VR tech and industry best practices. The slingshot is a delight: aim via the relative position of your two controllers, pull & release via the grip button, then pile on the chaos of the horde. You’ve got a weapon that’s exactly as accurate as necessary - more accurate (or less!) and mowing down critters simply wouldn’t be as fun. Spatial audio works perfectly to cue me to turn around to my blind spot and catch up on the spawn point I’ve been neglecting; no HUD needed.Mostly it’s just a thrill to watch these monsters emerge from the wall and hop on my couch before jumping down to the floor. (Of course… moments before I splatter them!)Perfect Little DetailsYour robo-companion doesn’t just dance when you start a wave… 0:00 /0:05 1× … they do the wave. Even staring straight at it, you might not make the connection, or you might shrug it off as a cheesy pun. As a critic, the signal here is quite loud: Developer Purple Yonder could put anything here, or nothing, and it chose to put something perfect. This inconsequential but briefly visible detail telegraphs the countless other truly invisible details where the team applied critical decision-making and taste.When collecting slimeballs, the in-game currency, nearly every toss to your bank is a swish as long as there’s nothing physically obstructing your path. 0:00 /0:05 1× This detail is likewise subtle, but there’s real gameplay impact: In later levels, as the difficulty ramps up, you’ll need to buff up your defense forces mid-wave. Few things would be as frustrating as losing a run because your slimeball missed the hoop. Or losing because you need to periodically abandon your tower to literally dunk the slimeball because soft tosses from any greater distance are too unreliable.One final little detail that’s even more abstract: Little Critters doesn’t really have a main menu or “home” landing scene. Many games drop you at a menu where you can select between “start” and “options,” or might bog you down with the preamble. Little Critters is remarkable in how hastily it gets you to your first wave of foes.These details add up: This is the kind of game you could drop a Quest first-timer into, offering the kind of title that a more experienced gamer will likely relish too.Scaling the TowerYour weapons level up as you progress. While I wish I could choose where to apply my upgrades, Little Critters choosing for me encourages me to overcome waves using the whole weapons suite instead of winnowing down to (and more rapidly growing bored with) my early favorites.I have mixed feelings about weapon effectiveness and combos: wall weapons seem best to place near the horde’s spawn points, but wherever you place them gets rendered useless as soon as said spawn points relocate. To boot, from the natural limitations of mixed reality gaming, wall weapons can be the most frustrating to reattach to a new area in a hurry. For the floor weapons, it’s hard to tell whether, say, the bubble gun or the pie launcher provides more effective ground defense; perhaps they work best in tandem. The bubble gun slows them down and your pie launcher knocks them out, or perhaps the difference is mostly aesthetic.My only lament is that I’ve unlocked the second “realm” available, which brings with it a new cohort of baddies… but the “realm” itself is still my living room. That’s more than a word choice nit: Games gain depth by transporting you to new locales; Mythic Realms does it well enough, but this is difficult for any game operating on the MR pretense of being in your own room. In hindsight, if I'm really motivated to seek a new “realm,” I could physically relocate from my living room to my kitchen, where I’d navigate the fridge and countertop instead of the couch and coffee table.While a more sophisticated game might offer stat bars and DPS calculations, what makes Little Critters a rush is dialing that part of your brain down and pelting numerous ogres with pies or tomatoes. It's a worthy addition to your library following Purple Yonder's work on Little Cities, and it's out now on Quest 3/3S.