There are few premise more immediately appealing than Squirrel with a Gun. A sandbox game where you control a gun-toting rodent and wreak havoc on the local population? Yes, please! And that premise certainly lives up to expectations to some extent, with some hilarious moments right from the start and plenty of enjoyment to be found in the opening hours of this wacky adventure. But this wacky Sciuridae simulator doesn’t sit on a pile of comical acorns; instead, it stuffs its cheeks with silly gags one at a time before finding its stores empty as the winter season quickly approaches. Adding to that short-lived hilarity are some pretty stern performance issues, including regular crashes that forced me to replay long sections of the game, which really unsettled me. Squirrel with a Gun still offers several hours of fun, sandbox fun, and I’m eagerly awaiting a more polished sequel in the vein of Goat Simulator 3, but this first attempt misses the mark as the joke falls flat.
Much like Untitled Goose Game and Octodad: Dadliest Catch, Squirrel with a Gun is a crazy sandbox game in which you take on the role of a troublesome animal who becomes a real problem for the people around him. After acquiring a gun from a bumbling government spy, you’re unleashed on a suburban community to rob people at gunpoint, wantonly destroy personal property, and exercise your Second Amendment right to shoot fools in the face like the bloodthirsty little pest you are. It’s fun! But the stupid part is exactly as shallow as it sounds, and while it only took me four hours to watch the credits, it took me even faster for the laughter to die down.
Fighting as a heat-packing squirrel is pretty empty. You’ll exploit pistols, rifles, and even grenade launchers to send Agent Smith– looking like the sons of a doomsday revolver – and they mostly just stand around and let you do it, putting up very little resistance. These are the only enemies you can find here, and they all go down after a few shots. One of the highlights is when you stun enemies and then you can kill them with a special finishing move, like whacking an enemy with lead from an Uzi or slapping away their grabby hands while you gunjitsu like a furry John Wick. Unfortunately, there’s only one such animation for each weapon, so the novelty wears off pretty quickly. There’s not much to the combat beyond those basics, and each weapon just feels like another indistinguishable piece of the arsenal within a few seconds.
There are two boss fights that spice things up though, where you fight giant military vehicles like a tank. These encounters are quick sequences where you shoot at glowing dots and drain your health bar, which isn’t much of a challenge, but at least they’re a nice change of pace and have a few gags that made me laugh. If there were more of these in the story, it could have extended my enjoyment considerably, but like everything else in this miniature adventure, these antics are fleeting.
On the other hand, the puzzle-platforming is much more satisfying. Firing weapons as a way to double-jump or otherwise launch yourself into the air to overcome platforming challenges is much more fascinating than any of the combat in Squirrel with a Gun. The submachine gun is a great way to stay in the air for longer periods of time while crossing gaps, but nothing beats the rocket launcher for pure height—it sends you flying to land (mostly) safely on distant platforms. None of the platforming is particularly challenging, but getting your fluffy avatar to sail from place to place doesn’t get lifeless as quickly as the rest of the gameplay.
Unfortunately, Squirrel with a Gun’s good times are prone to being interrupted by technical issues, which proved to be quite problematic even during its miniature run. I found myself staring at a frozen screen more than five times in as many hours, losing a fair amount of progress in the process and having to replay entire sections. Towards the end, I fell into a fear-fueled habit of running to the unchanging save points that can be found throughout each area – which is a good thing, because the crashes seemed to happen more often in the second half of the adventure. And that wasn’t the only problem I ran into: one cutscene triggered and I forgot to add the squirrel where it was supposed to go, which messed everything up and forced me to reset, and there were a few times when my little buddy would go through geometry at high speeds and send me crashing to the ground, forcing me to replay some of the platforming sections. Luckily, Squirrel with a Gun already takes on a certain kind of disordered energy, so the occasional stupid mistake isn’t the end of the world. But it did make some of the otherwise fun sections lose a bit of their luster when I had to replay them a third time after a crash.
