Urban Space Squirrels – An Xbox Indie Game Review

Developer: DTA Entertainment
Genre: Platformer
Countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States
Languages: English
Price: 80 Microsoft Points

Developer Summary:

It’s about a super-powered squirrel with bombs, in a semi-urban setting of puzzles. Somehow or another space is involved. Why haven’t you played this game yet?

What We Think:

The Few, The Proud, The Squirrelly

Cute, fluffy…highly destructive? Other than the small paragraph provided by DTA Entertainment about Urban Space Squirrels, there was little for me to go on in regards to just what this game was going to be about before I played it, it was left completely up to my imagination. Thankfully, the creation of this game was left completely up to the imaginations of the people of DTAE.

You play as agent 1337, a highly agile, incredibly intelligent super-squirrel with an armament of bombs so vast that only the Bush administration could have possibly provided it to him. However the twist is that these are antiparticle bombs, and rather than blowing up everything in sight, you use your bombs to flip switches, open locked gates, and propel yourself to otherwise unreachable heights. If you were hoping for mass squirrel destruction or a long-lost episode of Happy Tree Friends, forget about it, but don’t let that deter you, what’s waiting for you in this game is far more gripping, challenging and crafty than anything you will find in one of today’s uber-violent button-mashers.

This game will test your brain, your fingers, and your patience… and I mean that in the best way possible.

It’s Your World, Squirrel

Although not exploding (pun intended) with colourful creatures, or crafty character/level design, I still found this to be a highly polished and visually appealing title. Agent 1337 is well drawn and animated and his environments may be simple in concept, but they have a colourful bubble-gum visual aesthetic and help to add greatly to the ambiance. Objects and enemies are also simplistic in design, but do well to correspond to the look of the scenery, giving the title a somewhat 50’s approach to space design. I half expected Marvin the Martian to be a cameo, if not an end boss.

Even the menu screens have a pleasantly appealing cartoonish theme, somewhere along the lines of Dexter’s Laboratory or Clone High. Funny fonts, and simple background drawings help to add to the fun simplistic nature and really contribute to creating a light-hearted but well conceived design scheme.

Though this game will look best on higher resolution screens, It can be enjoyed on nearly any TV because of its basic approach. My TV sucks and I thought this game looked great.

Extreme Animal Testing

The game may not have been given much of a storyline, so here’s my take on it. Somewhere in the near future, scientists have realized that running a mouse through a wooden labyrinth in order to find a piece of cheese at the end is no longer a sufficient means with which to test an animal’s capacity for learning, Instead they arm them with endless bombs and set them loose in one of the craziest, mad-cap laboratories ever invented to see how they fare. What ensues is some of the most intense, skill-testing platforming action available since games like Ninja-Gaiden, or (dare I say it?) Castlevania.

The game starts lightly enough, you can run, jump and deploy a single bomb to flip a switch, open a gate or launch you in the intended direction. It’s a well calculated control scheme which helps to keep things simple at first. Run with the left analog stock, jump with the A button. The right analog will aim the bomb in which ever direction you push it, and then you simply hold the left trigger to send your bomb off in that direction. The Bomb will continue travelling in the intended direction until you let go of the left trigger, the right trigger explodes that bomb. It kind of works along the line of the puzzle bobble games, except you control the distance for how far the bomb is launched, and you can (and will have to) move while launching.

That’s it: the entire game is mapped to 5 buttons.  Seems simple, right? The game becomes much more advanced however as you pick up multiple bombs , which then forces you to use these bombs in succession, or conjunction with each other to solve a variety of brilliantly crafted puzzles which are just as, if not more, intuitive than what you would find on the early NES platformers. After a couple of levels you’ll be thanking the sweet scientist above that you only have to worry about 5 buttons, as the puzzles move so quickly sometimes that any more would melt our tiny little brains, though the game may be pop-rock in design, It’s heavy-metal in game play.

Some of the more brilliant puzzles involve use of the old Metroid-launch-yourself-in-the-air-with-bombs tool, the twist on this is that now some puzzles will force you to precisely place those bombs at certain spots in a puzzle, and in the proper order of detonation(bombs only explode in the order they are launched). Other puzzles require impeccable timing and hand-eye co-ordination as you traverse your way through narrow corridors lined with death-rays.

One puzzle had me so flustered (though it was about 3 A.M at the time) that I was forced to retire for the evening, however I ran it over in my head so many times that I was able to figure it out while I wasn’t even playing. To me that is the true sign of amazing and highly addictive game design.
There were multiple moments in this game, where I swore I was ready to tear my hair out, but all the while I had a smile on my face. It’s a relentlessly challenging game that will push your skills to the limit, yet it will never feel like success is completely out of your grasp.

No Squirrels Were Harmed in the Making of this Game

That’s actually a lie. This is the kind of game where you will die, and die a lot. The designers however have taken this(and your sanity) into consideration. Kindly they have put a number of checkpoints throughout each level, which you will instantly warp back to as soon as you are electrocuted, fried or squashed, however you may only save at the beginning of a level, so you may want to persevere and finish a level if you feel like you’ve made considerable progress through it. Starting again at the beginning of a level can be a might frustrating.

Squirrel Trumps Hedgehog

If it were up to me I’d crown a new king of animal-based platformers. This is Classic-platforming action at the top of its game. Without a doubt DTAE has created something special, and although this game only took me a day to beat, It would be more than worth it to re-visit and try to best my top times and scores. I’m sure that if they continue to make games in the Urban-Space universe, this squirrel is gonna fly.

Rating:  

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