Squirrel with a Gun Review

I never would have guessed that I would be checking out a game called Squirrel with a Gun. It sounds like an insane premise, but in this 3D platformer sandbox game, that’s exactly the fuzzy character you are playing as. This bizarre and crazy game reminds me of other indie titles that I have played in the past, like Untitled Goose Game and Goat Simulator. There seems to be a lot of humour here, but will the gameplay itself feel rewarding and make you want to play?

Our story begins with a squirrel going into a secret laboratory, where they see an experiment that is a similar shape to an acorn. Though it won’t be easy to steal as it is guarded by a barrier that needs to be disarmed first. This lab will act as a tutorial, teaching you how to control your squirrel and, more importantly, how to pick up a gun and fire it. Once the barrier is disarmed, our fuzzy protagonist, with a voracious appetite, wastes no time eating the device. At that instant, secret agents spill into the room, guns blazing; the squirrel is their target.

You will see these same agents throughout the game. They remind me of Agent Smith in The Matrix, with the dark suits and the sunglasses, and won’t stop at anything to take you down; they will even shoot innocent civilians if they are standing in the way. When you take down a human enemy, whether it be an agent or if you opt to take down other innocent people, they drop, and their bodies have a weird rubbery texture to them. All the bodies apparently weigh nothing because the squirrel can easily push them around… unless we have a squirrel with superhuman strength here. It kind of reminds me of the characters in Gang Beasts, where it seems that they don’t have bones.

When enemies are killed, they drop acorns for you to collect, which are used as currency to buy items like weapons or remote control cars. Though you don’t always have to be a violent squirrel, you can get acorns by letting the town residents ogle over you and take pictures with their phones. Once they fall in love, they will drop a stash of your favourite nuts on the ground. They may also follow you, which gets a bit creepy when you have a bunch of guys gushing over how cute the squirrel is.

Like a real squirrel, you will be able to crawl up trees, jump large distances, and go up flagpoles. But, to do this, you will have to make sure your hands are empty, so you need to drop your gun. Going up to the very top of the flagpole will prove to be very useful, as it will show you the location of all the large, golden acorns that are within eyesight of that location. There is no full map that will show you all these spots, so you will have to find all the different flagstaves around the town if you want to collect all those special gold acorns.
Acquiring these will be very important, as some of the items require a certain amount of normal acorns and these special golden ones to unlock. Some of the items, like a bomb suit and helmet, are very important, whereas others, like fake eyebrows, are just silly, but it’s always funny to see your dressed-up character on the title screen of the game.

The visuals in Squirrel with a Gun are pretty good, and on the PC you have a variety of settings that you can adjust to make it run smoothly. The squirrel is adorable, and there are a lot of different outfits that you can dress up in. I love how your clothing and accessory choices will be shown on your squirrel on the title screen. A squirrel with big eyebrows and a beret for a hat looks pretty entertaining. The music that plays while you are exploring the city is alright, but really ramps up once you get into battle with one of the agents. However, the best track is the one that plays during boss battles, it is an aggressive high-energy heavy metal song complete with screaming, it's great!

Most of Squirrel with a Gun is just exploring this little town and avoiding the secret agents. The game doesn’t tell you where to go, so it will be up to you to check out everything that you can. In this town full of clones, there were multiples of a few character designs, so you saw what looked like the same resident a lot. Some of the houses that you enter are very unique; one feels like a recreation of a room from The Floor is Lava Netflix show where you are jumping between pieces of furniture to navigate the room. You will even need to use your gun to fire at the floor to give you a tiny boost to extend large jumps.

Your squirrel can cause as much mayhem and destruction to this town as you want, and no one will stop you. Though after a few hours of this freedom, seeing the squirrel perform finishing moves on the agents wasn’t as entertaining as it was in the beginning, as each type of weapon only has one animation that will play. I also had issues with clipping where I would fall through a floor or one of the enemy agents would walk into a wall and get stuck. Playing through the game won’t take you very long, probably less than five hours, and a lot of that time, I spent a lot of it just racing around town in the RC car and using your squirrel's slow-motion sense to do cool trips going off the ramps in the skate park.

Squirrel with a Gun is an entertaining title to check out for a few hours because it is so over the top and ridiculous. I’ll never get tired of seeing a little squirrel carrying a shotgun or rocket launcher around! Just don’t expect a big story or anything like a long adventure here. Maybe if a sequel gets released, it will flesh out the world and add more to the tale of our weapon-toting squirrel.