Squirrel with a Gun Review

Squirrel with a Gun Review

Squirrel with a Gun sounds like one of those indie games that’s all title and no actual gameplay. I call them MadLib games. String together a couple of unrelated nouns, generate a few memes, and move on. But Squirrel with a Gun goes way beyond its zany title into the territory where legit good games reside.

More Than a Title

Make no mistake, Squirrel with a Gun first and foremost embraces its goofy premise. You play as a squirrel. With a gun. Actually, with an arsenal of weapons, including pistols, shotguns, rocket launchers, and many more. The heart of the game is an adorable, highly mobile rodent packing serious heat. That highly mobile part is critical, because Squirrel with a Gun is a third-person shooter married to a puzzle platformer and physics simulator. This means that the squirrel must be agile and controls need to be precise. 

Squirrel with a Gun doesn’t dwell too long on its narrative. You’re a squirrel playing havoc in a suburban neighborhood, collecting acorns, unlocking cool weapons and toys, and evading the secret agents or Feds trying to stop you. There’s a ton of mayhem and shooting agents in the face but it’s all bloodless and about as explicitly gory as a Bugs Bunny Road Runner cartoon.

The game is also a sandbox physics simulator, encouraging the player to creatively use the recoil from weapons, for example, to propel the squirrel to high locations. Squirrel with a Gun starts with some simple puzzles but amps up the challenge and complexity in pretty short order. Overall, I found the controls a little, well, squirrely. It was very easy to overshoot jumps, for example, and quite often the camera doesn’t play well with others. It can be frustrating to fail because the point of view doesn’t make it easy to line up jumps. When it works, however, Squirrel with a Gun impresses some pretty clever puzzle mechanics.

Drive Me Nuts

Squirrel with a Gun’s art approach is “stylized realism,” if that isn’t an oxymoron. The squirrel is cute and realistic but the rubbery-looking human characters are not and there are weird touches everywhere, like living rooms filled with lava. In addition to weapons, there are lots of other collectibles like outfits for the squirrel and vehicles to drive. The game’s musical score leans into a 1960s spy music jazz style. However, quite often the tempo and energy of the music feel arbitrary and disconnected from the action.

When it comes to technical polish, Squirrel with a Gun has the same kinds of bugs and small issues that accompany a lot of indie games. There are also little things that could be better explained, like how save points work (hint: bird baths).

Squirrel with a Gun isn’t long — a handful of hours, give or take — depending on your platforming chops. However, it does have a solid enough narrative premise and mechanics that it could easily be expanded with new areas, weapons, and collectibles. Its humor doesn’t rely too heavily on groan-inducing rodent or squirrel jokes, and the leading character is cute.

Puzzle-platformers are nothing new, but Squirrel with a Gun’s sandbox approach and jumping-shooting mechanics help it transcend the absurdist title. The game squirrels away a lot of fun and engaging gameplay that will surprise players not expecting the game’s variety and depth. All I know is, I’ll never look at our neighborhood squirrels quite the same way again.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***