Few premises are more immediately appealing than Squirrel with a Gun’s. A sandbox game where you control a gun-toting rodent and wreak havoc on the local population? Yes, please! And that premise certainly delivers to some extent, with quite a few laugh-out-loud funny moments right out the gate and a lot of enjoyment to be found in the goofy adventure’s opening hours. But this wacky Sciuridae simulator isn’t sitting on a stockpile of comedic acorns, instead stuffing its cheeks with silly gags all in one go, before finding its stores empty as the winter season fast approaches. Compounding that short-lived mirth are fairly serious performance issues, including regular crashes that made me repeat long stretches, which really took the wind out of my furry wings. Squirrel with a Gun still offers a couple hours of amusing sandbox goofiness, and I eagerly await a more fleshed out sequel in the same vein as Goat Simulator 3, but this first shot misses the target once the joke has run its course.
Like Untitled Goose Game and Octodad: Dadliest Catch before it, Squirrel with a Gun is a zany sandbox game where you play a troublemaking animal who becomes a real problem for the humans around them. After obtaining a pistol from a clumsy government spook, you’re let loose on a suburban community to rob people at gunpoint, wantonly destroy personal property, and exercise your Second Amendment right to blast fools in the face like the bloodthirsty little varmint you are. It’s a good time! But that dopey bit is exactly as shallow as it sounds, and though it only took me four hours to roll credits, it took even less time for the laughs to peter out.
Fighting as a squirrel packing heat proves pretty hollow. You’ll use pistols, rifles, and even grenade launchers to send Agent Smith-looking sons of a gun to their doom – and they mostly stand around and let you do so while putting up very little resistance. They’re the only enemies to be found here, and they all go down in a couple of shots. One highlight is when you stun enemies and are then able to kill them off with a special finishing move, like peppering an enemy with lead from an uzi or swatting their grasping hands away while you perform gunjitsu like a furry John Wick. Unfortunately, there’s only one of these animations for each weapon, so the novelty runs out fairly quickly. There isn’t much to combat beyond these basics, and each weapon feels like just another indistinctive piece in the arsenal in a matter of seconds.
There are two boss fights to shake things up, however, where you take on giant military vehicles, like a tank. These encounters are quick sequences where you shoot at glowing spots and whittle down a health bar, which doesn’t provide much of a challenge, but they are at least a nice change of pace and have a few gags that made me smile. If more stuff like this made it into the story, it might have gone a long way to extend my enjoyment, but like everything else in this brief adventure, these antics are fleeting.
The puzzle-platforming, on the other hand, is much more satisfying. Firing your weapons as a means of double-jumping or otherwise propelling yourself into the air to overcome platforming challenges is far more interesting than any of the combat in Squirrel with a Gun. The submachine gun is a great way to keep yourself airborne for extended periods of time while crossing gaps, but nothing beats the rocket launcher in terms of pure height – it sends you sailing into the air to land (mostly) safely on faraway platforms. None of the platforming is particularly tricky, but making your fluffy avatar sail from place to place doesn’t get old nearly as quickly as the rest of the gameplay.
Unfortunately, Squirrel with a Gun’s good times are prone to interruption by technical issues that proved quite problematic, even during its brief runtime. I found myself staring at a frozen screen more than five times in as many hours, losing a good chunk of progress in the process, and was forced to repeat entire sections. By the end, I got into the fear-driven habit of rushing over to the static save points that can be found in each area – and a good thing too, because crashes seemed to happen more frequently in the back half of the adventure. And that’s not the only issue I ran into, either: One cutscene triggered and forgot to add the squirrel where he’s supposed to go, which broke everything and forced me to reset, and there were several times where my tiny buddy passed through geometry when moving at high speeds and sent me tumbling to the ground, which forced me to repeat certain platforming sections. Thankfully, Squirrel with a Gun already embraces a certain kind of chaotic energy, so the occasional goofy glitch isn’t the end of the world. But it did make some of the otherwise entertaining sections lose some of their luster once I had to replay them a third time in the wake of a crash.
