I don’t have much bad to say about MOUSE. In a way, I understand those who’d call it mediocre, especially if they’ve got dozens of boomer shooters under their belt. The game leans heavily on the safest genre tropes. But it’s also easy to digest: a straightforward action-FPS with fun bits, even if it’s mostly lookist.

The script never hits a home run. From dialogue to plot, it’s a cheesy affair filled with cheesy jokes — stereotypical characters leaning on accents (French, German, Spanish, you know the drill). Our P.I. even calls out that they’re faking it. You’ll fight crooked cops, mobsters, Big Mouse Party goons, fringe scientists, and occultists across bunch of stages like sewers, swamps, an opera house, a mansion and... Hell. Sometimes it’s hard not to feel like you’re playing a mouse-shaped Indiana Jones. Obviously, the script never leaves the campy tone but it can get too over the top. The same approach also applies to guns that range from regular 20th century military stuff to a crowd-controlling chainsaw that can shoot projectiles. In complicit with today's shooters, most weapons have secondary alt-fire options.

On the plus side, the voice acting is great. Troy Baker leads, and I wouldn’t have known it was him without being told. Strong art direction, rich environments, a sweet jazz OST, and savvy sound design all work together to sell that mid-20th-century cartoon aesthetic. And MOUSE doesn’t forget to cram in plenty of classic movie references.

The structure is simple: drop into a level, take care of business (that is, indubitably, shooting everyone), leave. There’s a whodunit premise, but if a game isn’t marketed as a detective game, you can bet the detective mechanics won’t be fully gamified. You can collect clues and pin them on a board —some are missable— but they mostly act as collectibles. You’ll still go through the same main missions regardless, with no real puzzles or locked content. That might disappoint some, but I didn’t expect more from a game that calls itself a “guns-blazing, jazz-fueled adventure.”

On that front, MOUSE absolutely delivers. It scratches a specific itch, the New Order or CoJ Gunslinger kind. I got my money’s worth as far as the game's production value concerned, even if it never reached the fluidity of something like New Blood Interactive or 3D Realms boomer shooters. And I would believe that comparison, by nature, would not be doing any favours to MOUSE. Regardless, it's a well-produced, fast-paced shooter.

The runtime is about 10–14 hours for a semi-completionist run. I rarely got tired or bored, but the appeal faded quickly. One reason was the fact that it’s too conveniently easy. Typewriters (save points) are everywhere, plus auto-checkpoints. Consumables and armor are scattered liberally, and you can still carry up to nine cheeses. Ammo is plentiful. Even with a steady flux of enemies —snipers, brawler brutes, flyers, dogs— it all comes down to suppressing them with the James Gun (nope, not Gunn). I’m glad it’s not another weapon-juggling shooter, but I also had no real reason to experiment. With all these said, play on the hardest difficulty for a better balancing. There are powerups in certain encounters that turns each encounter a breeze and one of them lets you finger gun folk.

Traversal is often fun while doing some good ol' platforming and escape sequences but is underutilized in combat. Your capabilities include walljumping, grappling, double jumping and climbing. There are some open-ish levels where it's certainly more than a corridor and there are some optional objectives, but it never lets you roam ''free'' enough to find out interesting stuff. You'll be mostly dashing through tight corridors, and doors will slam after you, which will lock you out of grabbing missable stuff unless you restart the level.

Bosses are generally fun and on the stronger side, if not groundbreaking. The game includes cash for ammo, more collectibles and a baseball card mini-game I didn’t care for. Weapon upgrades come from missable schematics. There’s a hub city for mini-games, upgrades, and your office, plus a map you can drive across with roadside roadhouses for saving and shopping. I wouldn't call any of these necessary but they are there. Optional safes offer maze puzzles, some timed although I never ran out of it, some limiting your moves, and if you jam one, you restart from your last save. There’s no New Game+ or level select, so anything collected in the last two levels is essentially useless.

All in all, I’d have preferred a tighter 6–8 hour shooter with less dialogue and optional content. The detective angle is definitely redundant and doesn’t complement the action well. I’ll admit a bias: I used to read Detective Mickey (and those stories are no bueno), so I can handle cartoony noir scripts. But even for a lighthearted game, MOUSE can be overbearing, considering it seemingly flirts with heavier themes through dislocated shrews (a stand-in for Jews). At the risk of repeating myself, I must say: from occultist/esoteric objects and themes to fighting a party leader with a recognizable mustache that doesn't really take an educated guess, it's very Indiana Jones, and although it is sometimes at odds with the rest of the noir tone, I am all for it. You are highly likely to leave the game smirking.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

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Had no budget constraints, this would have been a classic. With what Milestone had, it'll carve out a semi-niche fanbase and will be following its racing colleagues in a line: "There was Split/Second, Pure, Ridge Racer, Blur... and Screamer."

It's sweet that people want story in their racers. The animated cutscenes here were simply amazing, no surprise, given the studio behind it delivered some of the most successful animated work for well-known IPs. They're sparse, which is understandable. But events themselves also act as cutscenes (animated or visual-novel-style), and sometimes you genuinely read more than you race. If I recall correctly, there are six events back-to-back where you only read cutscenes. That's overwhelming, and I wouldn't blame anyone for skipping them — I pretty much did so. I'm here for the races, not Doki Doki Drift Club. Sorry, if I must.

But skipping takes away from the context of the races and objectives, which surprised me. This is a narrative-heavy game, and the main tournament events (gold-colored ones) are actually straightforward, often functioning as tutorials. Even by the end, the objectives aren't really about "winning" which I respect. Most of the time it's about surviving a race, knocking out opponents and extracting revenge, or simply learning how your car works when you are introduced to a new character. If you expected a "story" where every event is another race you keep winning, this ain't it.

With a Tekken-like cast where everyone speaks a different language yet understands each other, Screamer is gritty and mature if not overly melodramatic. The PEGI16 rating, if you ever wondered why, is granted when you get that 'aha moment' seeing a man gets crushed under weight and blood is spilled, certainly an unorthodox moment for a racing game. It's essentially a tournament story hosted by a rich, mysterious benefactor, with several factions harboring ulterior motives. There are 21 playable characters (including the tournament hosts).

The campaign stretches to about 15-20 hours, plus split-screen (rare these days), multiplayer, and Arcade mode with six racing disciplines. The price isn't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ insane, but I'd have preferred a shorter game with a smaller cast for more animated screen time, a $40 price tag would've been too sweet.

Still, there are moments where the story bleeds into the gameplay, and that's a good effort. You won't catch them without watching the cutscenes. There are moments where you think, "Why is this too easy?" and "How the hell do you beat this guy?" Take Hiroshi's nemesis Gabriel, he gets knocked out, and you can easily beat him. Even then it's not a total breeze; you still need to study opponent movesets and race behavior (tbf, they mostly spam overdrive by the end). Then the host himself, he's an unstoppable beast, but as Hiroshi learns more about him, reveals his identity and motives, you understand him and beat him. You could say the devs just nerf and buff opponents according to the story, but it's still cool.

Some races feel mad, though. I haven't played many Milestone games in the last decade beyond the first Hot Wheels. Milestone is known for their bike racers; I quit those long ago, only briefly playing the first RIDE. I hear they're inconsistent, but Milestone releases lots of ♥♥♥♥. There are 13 games between Screamer and fkn Hot Wheels Unleashed — another Hot Wheels, Monster Jam, Monster Energy, annual MotoGP games, SBK (I left it at SBK X, probably one of their best), two more RIDE games. How can anyone keep up? So Screamer for most is just another Milestone game, but anime-styled.

I think Milestone just didn't know how to market this, but it'll get noticed in the long run. Until then, I can't say how bad the rubberbanding is or dive into other racing jargon because I simply didn't run each race dozens of times across difficulties. There were races where I gave up and switched AI difficulty from Medium to Easy (which I tried hard to stick with as the intended difficulty). I even switched tournament difficulty to "Story" from "Balanced Gameplay." The latter I feel worked better although I often noticed the objectives really didn't change. Some races I simply couldn't clear consistently. I'd chalk it up to skill issue, but it wasn't happening on main objectives, the hard parts are mostly side stories. Some races had me stuck for an hour, and I still couldn't tell exactly why. And that's despite all the accessibility and difficulty options.

It can get tough. Admittedly tough, and I'm low-key glad to see a game step away from conventional racers. But I also feel people are acting hard because it just released and if the learning curve is steep so is parsing out inconsistencies in the AI behaviour across dozens of events. Whether intended or not, there are events where the AI aggressively sticks to you and gaps you, and others where you gap them and leave the pack behind. Sometimes you actually need to babysit them as you are required to knock them out so you need to stay behind (and still asked to win the race). And sometimes, you can't even do that because they often place 1st or 2nd and you need to drive aggressively (regularly knocking out the pack to fill your gauge) to catch up. Objectives doesn't always align with how races play out and they feel unintuitive.

One particular frustration was chasing Fermi the corgi. That ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dog is wild. No matter how clean I raced, he always outpaced me with his boost, even on easier difficulties. When I was about to give up, a wise friend suggested ambushing him. It was a circular track with a KO objective. I waited, and as he approached, I knocked him out. It worked. Was it intended? I can't tell. Either way, I'm glad of the outcome.

Most races are about micromanaging your gauges - that comes as natural but may also distract you (particularly trying to read the cues for gear shift). As others have said, once the game clicks (timing the perfect boost, reading attack cues etc), it's a lot of fun. I didn't mind twin-stick driving, and while I can't say it's truly innovative, I wouldn't mind seeing more of it. I thought it would be tiring, but give it a few years and it'll feel second nature.

Character abilities add depth. They fit their personalities. Go into overdrive with your shield off and you risk exploding if you clip a corner. Some are risk-takers and have longer, more aggressive overdrives, while safer chars get conventional buffs like a secondary boost after a perfect boost or larger boost/entropy gauges or even an emergency shield when you get KOed. Hell, one of the chars has a secondary mechanic ''Hype'' which actually rewards drifting and you get a free strike when you 100% the bar. I wish that was the main part of the game.

I haven't played multiplayer, so I can't say how chaotic it gets, but in single-player, corner-bombing isn't easy. There were times I did everything right but was simply out of juice for any gauge, only to get wrecked at the last moment. Annoying as it is, that's probably the "emergent gameplay" beauty of these games. It's easy to think you can always align an opponent for a strike or micromanage gauges to perfection, but beyond a handful of races where I raged and couldn't tell if they were unbalanced or I just wasn't enough, it's usually manageable. That said, I wouldn't be surprised to hear some cars/abilities need balancing with a cast this large, it feels inevitable. That's what most fighting games suffer from.

The aesthetics are charismatic, though I lost some interest when the game stepped outside the bright neon streets. Then it launched me into a spaceship! There's good track variety, but environmentally it's still somewhat sparse.

I hope it'll continue. Milestone finally tried something original, and they might be about to hit it big.

★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

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