I wanted to love this more than I did. That is the most honest way I can start this.
Mouse P.I. For Hire has been on my radar since the first trailer, a black and white rubber hose animation boomer shooter with Troy Baker voicing a jaded mouse detective in a noir city full of corrupt rodents. That sentence should not work and yet it completely does. Fumi Games, a small Polish studio, spent years building this thing and it shows in every single frame. The hand drawn visuals are genuinely extraordinary, every weapon animation, every enemy, every inch of Mouseburg drawn by hand and moving with the kind of fluid exaggerated joy you only get from people who are properly obsessed with what they’re making. It looks like someone took a 1930s Disney cartoon, handed it a shotgun, and told it to go and sort out organised crime. As a visual achievement it is almost unreasonably good for the asking price.
And for the first few hours it plays as brilliantly as it looks. The shooting is fast and satisfying in that classic Doom-adjacent way where you are constantly strafing and juggling weapons and looking for the next power-up vending machine, all while Jack Pepper delivers one-liners in Troy Baker’s genuinely wonderful performance. Baker has clearly had a brilliant time with this role and it comes through in every line, the sardonic weariness of a mouse who has seen too much and still cannot help getting involved. The noir storytelling is charming, Mouseburg feels alive, the weapon variety is good and each gun has a distinct personality that matches the overall aesthetic. The first act of this game is an absolute blast.
The problem is that Mouse P.I. does not really evolve beyond that first act. You get the style, you get the shooting, you get the city and the cast of characters, and then the game just keeps going with all of those same elements for longer than they can sustain interest. New weapons come in but the fundamental loop stays the same. The environments start to feel like variations on a theme rather than genuinely new locations. The noir story, which starts with real promise, meanders in the middle section in ways that made me realise the script is a lot thinner than Troy Baker’s delivery makes it feel. Strip out the performance and the plotting is pretty conventional stuff, corrupt politician, criminal conspiracy, good guys and bad guys, the beats arriving more or less exactly where you expect them to. The social satire that the developers talked about in interviews, the commentary on capitalism and corruption abstracted through mice, never quite lands with the sharpness it seems to be aiming for.
At about the six or seven hour mark I found myself wishing it had ended two hours earlier. A tighter, leaner game would have been a nine out of ten. What we actually got is a game that has a brilliant first half and then quietly runs out of ideas while still having content left to deliver.
None of which means you should not play it. The art alone makes it worth your time if you have any affection for that era of animation, and thirty quid for a hand drawn boomer shooter with Troy Baker at the helm is not a bad deal by any measure. It is just a slight shame that Fumi Games clearly had the talent to make something really special and ended up making something good instead.
Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this product from https://www.keymailer.co