I’d been keeping on eye on this game for years. Ever since that first teaser trailer dropped right around the time Steamboat Willie was added to the public domain. The idea of taking classic Mickey Mouse cartoons and comics and adapting them into a DOOM styled boomer shooter was hilarious, but also felt so natural. The gameplay style of games such as DOOM and Duke Nukem felt so slapstick in its very nature, that the bombastic and over-the-top animation of 1930s cartoons such as Popeye and Betty Boop lent so well to it.

A black and white film-grainy romp with hand-drawn rubberhose animation, a huge selection of weapons, and a noir-esque detective plot of a magician mouse gone missing? All of the pieces to create a captivating experience are right here, and after about 3 years of development, MOUSE P.I. For Hire was let loose on the world.

While not directly taking characters and plot from Steamboat Willie, Mouse is injected with its art style. Every character looks like it could have been a rejected design by Walt himself, with their big ears and round white gloves. Extras also look like classic Disney affair, down to the random frogs and flowers and snails you’ll see scattered around the world. This game does a great job at blending these bouncy 2D animated rubberhose characters into its rather well designed 3D environments. It feels right at home, eluding back to the blendings of the real world and cartoon worlds in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Though by its nature, some of the 3D aspects of the world do feel quite out of place when having to be interacted with directly in-game. In classic cartoons, backdrops were often separately painted, with more texture but less outlines, to differentiate from the flat colored, thick lined characters that would be put over top. The game also tries to go for this feel, by making the non-interactive parts of the environment look more textured, but lacking in outlines, while making any interactive objects in the 3D space have darker lines, and a thick moving outline rendered onto the object. This works, and is an effective way to get the point across that, hey, that’s something I can actually grab or hold or hit. However, breakable objects, such as barrels and crates, which are absolutely LITTERED around the game world are often hard to tell apart from the rest of the environment and often left me just hitting random things because I couldn’t tell if it was a breakable object or just a prop.

The weapon selections in the game go from classic boomer shooter fare to just kind of boring and bland. Weapons I would use all of the time like the James Gun or the Devarnisher, paired next to weapons I would only use if I was out of bullets on my favorite guns, like the Jarhead and Kiss Kiss. So many weapons are also unlocked so late-game that I just don’t ever feel the need to get used to them or upgrade them, because I’ve only got a couple hours of the game left, why would I bother playing with a gun that doesn’t feel instantly satisfying? That said, I think it’s a shame that all of the guns in the game just kinda felt… run-of-the-mill? For a game entirely based around classic cartoon nostalgia, why are more of the weapons not themed around classic cartoon tropes? Sure, spinach and hot peppers are used as quirky little upgrades, and every now and then you can use finger-guns that insta-kill enemies, but why are the first few weapons just… pistol, shotgun, machine gun, rocket launcher? I just feel like there could have been more variety. A ray gun a-la Marvin the Martian? A trumpet like from Mickey Mouse’s “The Band Concert”? A boat cannon perhaps? Some sort of trilly whistling to call birds to attack enemies?

The traversal abilities are fun enough. Classics such as a double jump. Using your helicopter tail to hover around. A wall run and a ledge grab. Fairly simple, but they get the job done effectively and each has a charming animation that plays when you first unlock them to show how your character is now able to pull off such a move. Though, the animation for the wall run is absolutely disgusting. (iykyk)

Enemy varieties are fine enough, but do end up being quite repetitive. It comes down to about 5 major enemy types for the better part of the game, only really introducing more unique enemies right at the end of the game, and there’s so few they’re not even too notable. It comes down to an enemy with a melee weapon, an enemy with a gun, a big enemy that charges you, a short enemy with a melee weapon that moves fast (and sometimes explode), and a small flying enemy with a gun. Nearly all enemies in the game are just variations or reskins of these, some with only minor differences. For example, the short fast enemy can be a shrew that has a melee weapon and on occasion will pull out a bomb and explode near you. But sometimes, the short fast enemy will be a dog or an alligator that will only melee attack you and does not explode. But they move the same, do the same damage, and can be mowed down in hoards really quickly. Sometimes the normal sized enemies with guns will be slightly bulkier, signifying they have a machine gun instead of a single-shot weapon like a pistol, but still essentially the same.

This lack of enemy variety does get quite repetitive, but the movement and gunplay is fun enough, and the game is short enough where on a single playthrough, you’re not too likely to get bored that quickly. Repeat playthroughs might feel a little bit more bloated because of it though.

That brings up the next thing… repeat playthroughs. This game has plenty of collectibles, 4 major types. Newspapers, comic books, baseball cards and blueprint schematics. They’re often found in hidden areas in the levels and are fun to find and seek out behind puzzles in the environment. However, there’s a caveat. The level design in this game often punishes your exploration. If you accidentally walk through doors that progress the level without having fully explored everything previously, the game has a nasty habit of closing the doors behind you, rendering a return to previous area impossible. Now this normally isn’t a problem because you can just go back and replay the level later! Right?

Right?

See that’s where a funny quirk of this game is. You can’t replay stages. You can’t beat a level and then come back to collectible hunt. There’s no level select, there’s no collectible progress screen, and there is no queen of England. If you miss a collectible, you don’t get to go back. And if you missed a collectible and completed the level, you’ll never know that you missed one, because the game will never tell you. You’re shit-out-of-luck. There’s mini-games to unlock hidden safes and doors scattered throughout levels that require a lockpicking puzzle to get through and if you fail the puzzle, you’re barred from the lock and cannot retry unless you restart the level or load a previous save. Which is… crazy. Barred from a collectible, and if you don’t essentially go back in time to before you ever tried the puzzle in the first place, you don’t get to go again.

It feels like such a simple thing that modern games do, allowing you to select a level and go back to play challenges or hunt collectibles or speedrun for a personal best time in a stage, but this game actively punishes that mentality. I didn’t realize until 8 hours into this roughly 12 hour long game that I wouldn’t be able to go back and play through previously completed levels because the game does not let you, even after credits roll. When you beat the game, and load back into your file, you are loaded in right after beating the final boss, and right before the final cutscene. And you can’t even go back through the level you load into because the door is permanently locked. I was expecting to load into the world map and be able to select whatever I wanted on the map to replay, but that’s simply not the case.

Which makes for another absolutely crazy game design decision. Since you can’t replay levels, the game expects you to start the game over and hunt for those collectibles on a second playthrough, which I would gladly do if there was a New Game + mode, so I could actually have time with the guns I unlocked late-game and have upgraded throughout my first playthrough, but you can’t even do that! You start from zero again. Pistol only, no upgrades, no abilities. And once again, still no way to keep track of your collectibles because the game does not provide you with any way to know how many are in a given level. The only way to truly have a completionist run of this game is to obsessively track over a 100% walkthrough of the game on a second screen, and hope to hell you don’t miss anything.

Then, because I can’t seem to stop complaining, this game is absolutely bug-riddled. My friend Joey (who did actually 100% this game) said he had no major game-breaking bugs on his multiple playthroughs, but I had so many it was ridiculous. Constant falling through the floors, or getting permanently stuck on random geometry. Abilities just deciding not to work, or the game blocking my ability to heal, despite me carrying MULTIPLE healing items. Every few seconds, my weapons would just switch to other guns I didn’t want to use, even though I wasn’t pressing anything. Getting insta-killed by random parts of the environment, getting insta-killed by automated things that I had zero control over, grapple hooks straight-up not letting my use them, triggers for photo events not popping up whatsoever until I reloaded my save. This game felt like it had a personal vendetta towards me and I cannot explain why.

BUT, despite all of my struggles and trials and tribulations… I had fun. I enjoyed this game. I enjoyed it for one solid playthrough that I was very excited to dive into when I first launched it. That first playthrough was a genuinely good experience. Sadly, I will not be giving it a second playthrough because… I just don’t think the charm of the game is strong enough to keep me from being actively upset about the flaws, the bugs and the repetition.

I want to LOVE this game, for all of its charm and characters and stellar voice cast, and really creative world-building, but sadly I will have to settle for just… liking it. I liked it. I like Tammy and John. I like the backstory for Cornelius and Steve. I like the art style and the gritty detective story. I like the analogy for the shrews and I like that you can get an achievement for punching a nazi and I like that you can pin clues to your bulletin board and I like that you get to befriend a mystical cajun shrew lady. I like the DOOM parody level and that the Hellraiser chainsaw is an unlockable weapon. I like this game. But I don’t like that I can’t love it.

MOUSE P.I. For Hire

6/10