Mouse: P.I. for Hire

Mouse: P.I. for Hire is such a beautifully crafted experience - a fully realised noir cartoon with proper intrigue and surprising heart - it'd be hard to completely dismiss, even if it did fumble the stuff underneath. But it doesn't. Fumi has more than risen to the occasion here, with a smart, surprising, and wonderfully atmospheric adventure that feels so much bigger than the enjoyably chaotic combat at its core. Here's to those little touches that make all the difference, then. And to the fact you can drop an anvil - or indeed a piano - on a man's head.

Mouse: P.I. for Hire is an amusing enough FPS if you just want to blast some cartoon mice and not think about it too hard, but its haphazard marriage of noir storytelling and boomer shooter action are at odds in uncomfortable ways that weaken both aspects.

Mouse: P.I. might not reinvent the wheel, but its arsenal of weapons is punchy and delightfully varied, while the fluidity of movement makes for some thrilling, high-speed shootouts. In this instance, you should have no qualms about handing over money to the mouse.

I’m having a hard time finding anything wrong with Mouse: P.I. For Hire. It has impressively robust world building, and every level and environment feels like something you’d see waiting in line at Disneyland. It feels alive and bustling, with plenty of NPCs roaming around that help the world feel alive and breathing.

Mouse: P.I For Hire blends kinetic gameplay with stunning rubber-hose visuals and furnishes it in a noir detective story. There was a lot of hype going into this one and Fumi Games have absolutely knocked it out of the park.

But it is true for MOUSE: PI For Hire. A mechanically solid albeit mostly average FPS wrapped in a beautifully realised stylistic package with incredible commitment to the bit. MOUSE is a game that lives and dies on the charm in the art it evokes, and the references it is slavishly committed to. If you want to play a shooter that doesn’t take itself too seriously, you can do far worse.

These moments, combined with the fascinating vintage visuals and music, make it easy to overlook the areas where Mouse wastes some potential. Sure, I'd have liked more meaningful investigative mechanics and fewer reskinned baddies, but I was often too busy tapping my toes to jazz tunes and laughing at the riotous cartoon antics to be too bummed about it.

The social commentary running through each case feels reheated and the dialogue’s lacking that Raymond Chandler wit, but the slimy politicians, jaded film stars and bizarro cultists of Mouseburg are sharply drawn in every sense. In the end it’s the gunplay, the detective downtime and the world-building that elevate this choice cut of detective noir, not the whodunnit aspect, and I’m absolutely fine with that.