“The average squirrel cogitation goes something like this: I wonder what there is to eat.”
There’s been a growing trend in indie games lately that I am a complete sucker for: animals causing problems. Not humanoid animals, not animals in an animal society. Just your average, everyday creature going into the human world and messing everything up. Games like Goat Simulator and Untitled Goose Game started the snowball. Now we’re getting a veritable bonanza of critter games. You can run around making mischief as a crow (Just Crow Things), a raccoon (Wanted Raccoon), a seagull (Guano), and now, in a highly anticipated release, you can be a Squirrel With a Gun.
The premise is really as simple as the title suggests. You’re a normal North American Gray Squirrel. While exploring the neighborhood, you find a secret bunker with a strange device in it. To your squirrel eyes, it’s a gigantic golden acorn, and you want it. After ganking it from its protective pedestal, alarms begin to blare, and men in black suits deem you Target Number One. They’re all armed, but you know how to use a gun. It’s a bit awkward, with a single handgun being as big as you, but you make it work.
Once you escape the MIB and the bunker, the world opens up into a cozy neighborhood filled with acorns ripe for the taking. With your newfound ability to pull a trigger, you can roam at will. Let people take your picture with their cell phones or hold them up and make them give you all their acorns. Take down more MIB either with guns or with stealth tactics, climbing up their backs and snapping their necks. You are a squirrel with no mercy.
It’s a What Now?
You may think, from the title, that Squirrel with a Gun is a shooter. You’d be wrong. It’s actually a third-person platformer collectathon. Effectively, every house or area in the neighborhood is a level with three kinds of major collectibles: golden acorns, clothing, and reload expansions. Climb up a nearby flagpole and you can get a look at what you’ve found and what’s still to find in the related stage. As with other collectathon platformers, the name of the associated mission for the golden acorns is a hint of what you have to do. There are also regular acorns all over the place which are your primary currency for buying, well, guns. And other stuff, but mostly guns.
Travel in Style
Clothing may seem like an optional collectible, and in some cases that’s true. A few are purely cosmetic. However, some of the outfits you can find are actually useful. The Solid Snake eyepatch, for example, boosts the damage of your neck snapping. A bomb suit protects you from explosives, a necessity for a particular house with a paranoid owner. A sparkler party hat lights things on fire – great for burning haypiles and setting off propane tanks. You can easily swap your costumes in the pause menu to quickly change into whichever you need at the time.
How does a little squirrel get around a big neighborhood quickly? It’s true: on paw, you aren’t exactly the fastest rodent in the world. Luckily, one of the unlockables is a little remote-controlled car. Perfectly sized for a little guy who needs to go fast. As long as you’re standing on a road, once you’ve unlocked it, you can summon a car right to you and speed your way wherever you want to go. Unfortunately, you can’t summon your guns as easily. Those you have to find in specific spots or steal from the MIB. Luckily, the spawn points don’t change, so you can get there in a timely manner with your cool car.
Squirrely Controls
The biggest question when it comes to any kind of platformer for me is, how are the controls? Whether it’s a precision platformer or casual jumper, the game controls and camera controls can make or break the game. Unfortunately, the controls in Squirrel with a Gun are a little, well, squirrely. Accurate to squirrels, you’ve got a big jump. Add in a high level of physics interaction and it can be a little frustrating when you’re trying to land on a small spot. It’s easy to overshoot and wind up falling to the ground at best, or taking a lava bath at worst.
The driving mechanics are also fairly challenging, as the car has a secondary purpose: stunts. You’ll spin, flip, and otherwise show off for easy acorns, but it also means you’ll easily find yourself facing the wrong direction or going into a spin when you want a slight shift in direction. However, there aren’t too many driving challenges, and at least you’ll make money while you figure it out.
All The Parts Make a Whole
As far as the collectathon elements go, it’s fairly generous compared to my own personal favorites. You need many of the golden acorns to get to the final boss, but not close to all of them. While none seem particularly challenging to get, you don’t have to feel like you need them all.
And of course, we can’t talk about Squirrel with a Gun without talking about the guns. Since the game isn’t exactly a shooter, the gun controls are fairly lenient and even a little inventive. The basic controls couldn’t be simpler: aim and shoot. The aiming doesn’t exactly auto-target, but it does try to focus on the nearest enemy in the direction you’re facing. Also, since you’re a tiny squirrel, their aim isn’t all that good. You can generally run circles around a group with only a nick or two. Unless they have explosives. In that case, watch out. You’re going to learn to fly real fast.
Speaking of flying, you can use guns for that too. After all, you’re small. The guns are big. When you jump, you can fire your weapon several times for an extra boost of distance. Different weapons give you different distances. You’re not going far with a shotgun, but the uzi will send you rocketing across gaps. And of course, the rocket launcher will, well, it’ll blow you up, but you’re also gonna get great height.
Final Thoughts
It’s definitely a strange feeling to expect a game to be a goofy shooter and instead discover it’s your favorite genre. I can’t say I couldn’t be happier; there are elements that could be improved on. The somewhat slippery controls on jumps, the squirrely driving mechanic, and a slightly too long reload on death keep it from perfection. Still, it’s a fun and funny take on my favorite genre that kept me laughing the whole way through.
Special thanks to Maximum Entertainment for providing us with a copy of Squirrel with a Gun.
PIXEL PERFECT
Recommended
Maggie Maxwell spends most of her days buried in her fiction writing, only coming up for air to dive into the escapism of video games, cartoons, or movies. She can usually be found on Twitter as @wanderingquille and @MaxNChachi or streaming on Twitch with her husband, also as MaxNChachi.
