Next up for me is
Mouse: P.I. For Hire, the game made famous because IGN assigned someone extremely pretentious to review it.
Unfortunately, I have to largely agree with IGN's now-legendary 6/10 review, though I would argue it's not so much "too much cheese" as it is "too little creativity. It's a 1st time effort from a team of developers who were previously animators, and it really...really...REALLY shows with how slapdash this game feels at time.
I really wanted to like this game coming in. I love vintage noir stories, having spent a considerable amount of time over the years listening to 1930s radio dramas of The Shadow and Sherlock Holmes. I adore quality 2D animation. I quite enjoy Troy Baker's voice acting. So why do I find a game that combines all of these things in a shooter experience to be somewhat tedious and dull?
Well, it doesn't help that this game has exactly one design philosophy: you enter a large arena, doors open, and a bunch of goons swarm you in waves. I didn't enjoy this format when Uncharted was doing it, and I find it just as annoying here because outside the boss fights the game never really CHANGES. And perhaps more than any other genre, shooters rely on combat & level design variety since there's only so long you can make "shoot them in the head" interesting. Unfortunately, the enemy types are very limited, and certain weapons like the Varnisher are so ridiculously overpowered (one shot from it will kill most enemies, and the ammo is common) that there's really no reason to use more than 2-3 of your 12 weapons. You can easily coast through the entire game using just the Varnisher; the (Tommy) Gun; and your pistol.
Level design really feels like a first draft: corridor -> arena -> room -> corridor -> arena, etc, with invisible walls and visual bugs all over the place. The game didn't even let you replay levels for missing collectibles and side quests until a very recent patch, baffling for a game that places as much emphasis on them as it does.
And it REALLY doesn't help that this is an around 20 hour game presented (with one lone exception) entirely in Black & White. Yes, it's a unique visual aesthetic, but I don't want to look at it for the entire length of Chrono Trigger. There's a reason I was switching between this game and Kingdom Hearts 1 for a while in July before I eventually just gave up on Mouse P.I. and put it down 3 hours in. But beyond the eye strain of looking at the game, the entire game being shades of gray also means that it's a lot harder for the devs to draw the player's attention to things like collectibles or even the critical path. So much of the game is just a sea of gray and white that it's very easy to get turned around at times. I have a feeling the D-pad button press that lets the game show you at any time where the path forward was added very late in development to address this problem.
Overall, the game's not bad. It's a perfectly serviceable, average arena shooter (or "boomer shooter"), but it feels like it needed another 6+ months in development to fully cook. The story in particularly doesn't feel fully fleshed-out, considering how much emphasis the game puts on it. I can't remember if the game's final boss was even mentioned before his appearance in the 2nd to last level. And so much of the writing is "hey! here's a reference to something famous!" without adding anything clever or interesting to the joke.
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