Is this worth hoarding for winter or would you be nuts to forage this out?
Squirrel With A Gun emerges from the folks at Dee Dee Creations, and there are only four of those folks and was published by Maximum Entertainment. It goes without saying that Squirrel With A Gun is a passion project indie title. An actual indie title, not the so called “iii Indie game” thats actually funded by be a huge publisher and it’s obvious that this is a passion project.
I’m not entirely sure how to classify Squirrel With A Gun, to do so using far too many words I’ll call it an “Action Adventure Physics Shooter”. You play as a Squirrel, so naturally you need to gather as many Acorns as you possibly can. There’s just one problem, some suit and shades secret agent looking chaps have a huge acorn and they’ve locked it in a vault.
This is where you’ll begin your bushy tailed time, you’ve made it into said vault and need to work out how to liberate the nut from it’s forcefield. Now, milage will vary as to your individual gaming IQ but what you need to do is blatantly obvious and this initial vault serves to introduce you to the games control scheme. You’ll devour the nut but as you’re doing so an agent rumbles you. Agent Clutz (thats not his official name, but it’s what I called him) trips on his way into the room, his pistol scatters across the floor and the game really begins as you’re finally a squirrel with a gun.
You escape the base and are now in a small suburb, this is where the majority of the game takes place, this suburb is divided into sections and each one has its own set of collectibles. The main ones to look out for are the golden acorns as these will let you unlock more weapons and eventually a car, a care you’ll need to enter the underground to battle daddy with a tank. That sentence alone should set the tone well enough for the general vibe of Squirrel With A Gun.
Squirrel With A Gun is completely bonkers and it shows in the ways you’ll unlock these golden acorns, my favourite being playing basketball to climb onto a roof so that you can push a groom who’s missing from his wedding off the roof to awaken him from his drunken coma. If that sounds like too much effort you could settle for robbing normal acorns from the citizens at gunpoint.
There’s a decent variety of weapons for your rodent to reload, pistols, shotguns, submachine guns and explosives but these weapons may be used to take out he agents hunting you, but it’s not their only use. As mentioned earlier physics play a big role In Squirrel With A Gun. Pistols aren’t big, but they are to a Squirrel, so pulling the trigger causes the recoil to throw you around the games sandbox, the bigger the gun, the more recoil and it’s so much fun. Sometimes I’d just navigate the area by firing an uzi into the ground pushing my adorable bushy self into the sky.
Visually Squirrel With A Gun is fine, some of the animations are a tad ropey and don’t line up properly, for instance snapping someones neck results in the squirrel floating around the enemy and it doesn’t look like his paws are even on the foe but other than noticing it momentarily it didn’t dampen my enjoyment of Squirrel With A Gun at all. So far as the soundtrack is concerned, I promise you that the battle theme during the tank fight will be stuck in your head for days. The only downside to this boss fight is the awful vehicle controls, in fact controls are the only real downside to the game. Everything just feels to light and twitchy and it can make simple platforming frustrating.
Squirrel With A Gun is around 2-3hrs long but it’s asking price reflects this and if your a fan of games like Goat Simulator and Untitled Goose game Squirrel With A Gun will be right up your tree, and once you’ve played it I wouldn’t be surprised if it became a byword for fun wacky Indie games.
