Mouse P.I. for Hire Review: A Rubber-Hose Boomer Shooter With Real Bite
Ace's most anticipated game in ages turned out to be more than a pretty face. Under the 1930s cartoon style is a fast, smart, genuinely great shooter.
AceBy Ace
Mouse P.I. was the game Ace was most hyped for in ages (Kena aside). Josh, on the other hand, worried for months that it would be all style and no substance: gorgeous 1930s rubber-hose animation wrapped around a thin shooter. In our first-ever triple review episode, Ace got to settle it.
Is it a real shooter?
It is a legit good first-person shooter. That's not to say it isn't heavily reliant on what it looks like. But it does not mean it's not a solid shooter.
Think Doom with some Duke Nukem and Max Payne mixed in. You're Jack Pepper, a cheese-loving private eye voiced by Troy Baker, who drops cheese puns nonstop. (Someone asks if he brought the cheddar. "Is gouda good enough?") Movement is where it starts to shine: a dash, a double jump, a wall run, and a propeller tail for hovering up to higher ledges. Arenas are built for chaos, with explosive barrels to throw and shoot midair, and anvils and pianos hanging from ropes just waiting to be dropped on someone.
The arsenal starts with your mitts (a right hook, a left hook and a wind-up uppercut) and gets more cartoony the further you go: pistol, shotgun, tommy gun, a cannonball launcher, an incendiary super-shotgun tribute called the Kiss Kiss, and the Jarhead, a brain in a jar that blasts sound waves until heads explode. Every upgrade visibly changes your gun, BioShock-style.
It's not easy, and that's good
There are three difficulty settings. Ace says not to drop below normal, and if you know your shooters, play on hard. There are no invincibility frames and no safe hiding spots. Enemies flank you, and snipers relocate if they can't get an angle. You have to stay aggressive and push, Master Chief style.
The bosses are all different, too. No tank-and-spank bullet sponges here.
The detective part
You are a detective, and you work three cases at once. You collect clues in each level (with optional extras that speed things up), photograph evidence, then head back to base to pin it all on your crime board while Jack connects the dots, sometimes across cases. It's a cool system, but you're gathering clues for Jack to solve, not doing the deduction yourself.
If you're looking for a super serious noir detective game, this is not it. Play L.A. Noire.
The art
Yes, the look does a lot of heavy lifting, and it's spectacular: 54,000 hand-drawn frames of animation. Mouseburg is full of cheese graters, wartime flashbacks and silly cartoon logic, which is the only way Jack gets away with this body count. There's also a fan-made blood mod that adds a splash of red to the black-and-white world, and it looks incredible.
The VGP take
Ace gave Mouse P.I. an 8.9 and expects it to be in the running for best debut indie of the year. At $30, he says it's absolutely worth trying, especially if you've never played a boomer shooter, because it's one of the most approachable ones out there. Even Josh admits the footage turned him around.
Steam agrees: it was sitting at 95% overwhelmingly positive when we recorded.