Squirrel With A Gun Review (PS5) – Infurious Basterds
Squirrel With A Gun is exactly what the pistol-totting cuddly creature says on the tin. You’re a squirrel, you get guns. You shoot bystanders and agents, shake them down for acorns and look badass doing so, rocking a top hat and trench coat on your crime spree. Much like the Goat Simulator 3’s and DEEEER Simulator’s of the world, it’s all about the absurdity. The implausible insanity that only a cheeky and unscrupulous video game can capture.
These games are the Sharknados of the video game space. For the record, I love Sharknado – don’t @ me. The real question is whether there’s a good game lurking underneath the initial wild wackiness of seeing a bipedal squirrel holding a sniper rifle that’s 5x it’s own size. Did I mention you fight a tank and attack helicopter too? Yeah, that happens.
So, let’s break out of this crazy research facility and wreak some havoc among the populace. Is this squirrel packing enough heat to last, or does it end up roadkill?
(Ro)dent In The Armour
Squirrel With A Gun opens with you – a squirrel – breaking out of your containment facility. Why am I squirrel? Don’t care. What is the facility? Doesn’t matter. Who are these Men-in-Black caricature agents? HERE’S A GUN, SHOOT THEM. If you wanted a premise for this madness, Dee Dee Creations are not willing to provide one. To be honest, I think this works better – better to just shove a gun into your paws and let you loose.
So, what do you do as an escapee rodent with a militaristic bone to pick with humanity? Pop agents and get riches (acorns) of course. Spread across Squirrel With A Gun’s decently sized suburb map are golden acorns, regular acorns, cosmetic outfits and photo filters. Golden acorns are persistent, regular ones act as currency. You need both to unlock weapons, traversal options and the two later areas of the map.
Think of it like Spyro, except instead of a sprint you have a remote-controlled toy car, and in place of a flame breath, you have a double-barreled shotgun. Collecting golden acorns forms the meat on the bones of this admittedly meagre frame. Most involve a basic traversal puzzle or solving of some kind of random logic within the environment. Some are relatively fun to uncover, others are akin to the embarrassment of explaining to your loved ones you dropped 20 acorns for a rogue squirrel in the street.
Squirrel This Away
This non-marsupial (trust me, look it up) relies on weapons to get around the neighbourhood. You know, because houses are human sized and not squirrel sized, funnily enough. The pistol does a double jump, the Uzi lets you bounce yourself mid-air long distances, while the sniper, bazooka and shotgun fire you up higher. Squirrel With A Gun therefore amounts to finding the right weapon and route across hazards and vertically challenging areas.
Whether you’re clearing enemies, shooting targets in sequence or navigating floating platforms, the mechanics are as sturdy as this rodent’s bushy tail. Aiming is a crapshoot, even when locked on at times. Running and jumping are generally okay, but are clunky in more intricate arenas. There are some genuinely decent ideas sprinkled around this cul-de-sack of mayhem with some of the puzzles. Unfortunately, too often I found myself more annoyed at repeating sequences because of wonky jumping or running out of ammo.
One area I will credit Squirrel With A Gun with is the way in which you can solve problems. At one point, I was supposed to fill up inflatable objects with helium to launch platforms so I could powerbomb onto buttons. I couldn’t find the helium, so I grabbed a rocket launcher and boost-jumped myself instead. It worked, non-sensically. The developers have put a good amount of thought into allowing players to solve these environmental puzzles in fun ways, which is rewarding.
Check Out This SWAG (Squirrel With A Gun)
In fairness, Squirrel With A Gun is at it’s most enjoyably ridiculous best when you’re just letting yourself get caught up in the absurdity of it all. Discovering I could let a pedestrian excitedly take a picture of me, only to crawl up their body, snap their neck and nick their phone was hilarious. The first time. It’s when the joy of this discovery quickly runs out and you have to play it as an actual video game it starts to fall apart.
The two boss battles you face are comical in their theater and set up, but relatively inane to actually complete. Shoot the glowing spots, avoid waves of repeating enemies, stun them repeatedly to get some damage in, rinse repeat. Moreso, the traversal mechanics are more frustrating than trying to explain how cookies work to your technologically phobic grandparents.
I quickly unlocked both the adorably tiny car and boat to zip around the map. I also quickly discovered they are the absolute worst things to ever transport a living being, possibly ever. The car is more erratic than your local town’s eccentric oddballs, darting off the straight line it should follow without issue. Body, weapon or anything in the way? You’ll be sent flying off into lava, or even more annoyingly, off the tower you’ve just spent time climbing.
I get it – they’re small, it’s probably what would happen in real life. However, I’m playing a squirrel that can ride a rocket mid-air (awesome, by the way) and successfully use a lethal weapon that requires thumbs, this isn’t the height of realism.
Fun Control
At the risk of sounding like a childish buzzkill, Squirrel With A Gun also struggles visually and performance wise, not just in its gameplay. Sure, the takedown animations for each weapon are amusingly over-the-top and the odd moments of references to other media like the Akira slide or Metal Gear Solid evoke a laugh. Everything else though? Yikes.
For a relatively small map and limited numbers of objects, the texture pop-in is ever-present. Character models, while intentionally caricatured, are also just ugly. It’s hard not to be distracted by how rough so many of these environments are and how poorly optimised this game is in places. The variety of cosmetics is surprisingly impressive and actually pretty cool – who doesn’t want a mohawked albino squirrel causing chaos everywhere it goes?
Squirrel With A Gun is an Unreal Engine 5 game and you genuinely would not know it unless you were told (as I was, thanks to Josh). Some of the visual style gets a pass given that it’s a game about a squirrel with a gun. The majority however, does not, as it’s just straight up not a particularly nice game to look at or spend time exploring.
Bleary Eyed & Bushy Tailed
Once the initial opening salvo of Squirrel With A Gun’s wild but hilarious beginning subsides, you’ll sadly be left with what is otherwise a mediocre third-person shooter. It’s also very short, clocking in at about two hours. Albeit there are a wealth of other acorns and cosmetics to collect, even if the motivation to do so is lacking.
It’s the fast food equivalent of a video game. The first bite into that greasy pizza or fried burger sates that dopamine desire for a fleeting moment. After the blitz of short-term gorging passes, there’s just the enduring feeling of shame. There’s a definite meme quality and I genuinely did laugh more than once during my short stint as a violent, adorable serial killer, which lends merit to some of what the developers set out to achieve.
Perhaps this is more for the kids and more immature among the community. If you’re seeking a decent video game to accompany your laughs and absurdity however, you’ll find Squirrel With A Gun is a few acorns short of a winter stash.
Squirrel With A Gun is available now on PlayStation 5 (review platform), PC and Xbox Series S|X.
Developer: Dee Dee Creations
Publisher: Maximum Entertainment
Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy from the publisher.
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