Mouse: PI For Hire is one of the best first-person shooters I’ve played in many years. A classic story of Nazi mice, a missing magician, and robots Mouse: PI For Hire,available on consoles and PC starting on April 16, stars anthropomorphic mouse Jack Pepper, a war vet and former cop turned privatedetective, who lives and operates in a city filled with many other talking and walking mice and shrews. When one of Jack’s old war buddies, now living life as a famous magician, goes missing, he’s pulled into a case that quickly grows into something much wilder and more deadly for those involved.
This is a case that’s connected to big-time mice, missing shrews, an evilpolitical party directly inspired by the Nazis, creepy monsters, robots, and much more. At times, Mouse: PI For Hire’s writing can feel very heavy-handed; there's literally a Nazi-like party of mice that seems involved in trying to round up shrews (*looks at the screen*). But, for the most part, Mouse’s noir tale kept me hooked as I wanted to find all the clues spread across levels, stick them on Jack’s corkboard, and connect all the dots to solve the biggest case of his career.
To put all those pieces together and solve the case, you’ll need to explore a dozen or so hand-crafted levels and do a lot of shooting. Thankully, the combat and level design in Mouse: PI For Hire are top-notch. A wonderfully animated world The big draw that will likely be what gets a lot of people to check out Mouse: PI For Hire in the first place is for sure going to be its distinctive visual style inspired by classic cartoons.
It looks cool, but I was concerned that this art style would lead to levels that all feel and look the same. Instead, Mouse’s devs and developers use its classic cartoon aesthetic to offer up a variety of experiences as tasty and diverse as a fancy cheese board. Sure, there are the setting you’d expect from a black-and- white noir-themed shooter, even one starring mice.
Theseinclude backalleys, crime scenes,shadyestablishments, and seaside docks. But Mouse also includes creepy swamps, weird labs, movie sets, and more that I don’t want to spoil in this review. Every one of these levels takes inspiration from classic cartoons and movies from the ‘30s and ‘40s to offer up a greatest hits–like spread of animation tropes and ideas.