>>306363 (OP)
I beat it, it was okay. Maybe my expectations for FPS are just really low. I still had a lot of problems with it.
The game design was made up of a lot of stupid decisions. Surprisingly enemies weren't hard to see and felt good enough to shoot, but the problem is the guns you're shooting them with and the arenas you shoot them in. The majority of the arsenal is downright useless, like 3-4 of the guns are actually useful (James gun, Devarnisher, Shotgun, Ice beam) and you're only really going to be using two of them most of the time. The rest either don't get enough range to deal with the major threats or just don't do any damage to begin with. The Devarnisher especially is overpowered, basically guaranteeing a kill in a single shot on every ranged enemy except snipers. The only reason you'd use the other weapons is if you got bell curved like I did and decided to 'try them out maybe they're not so bad and have some sort of use'. I can tell you now, just minmax the James Gun and Devarnisher.
Every arena you play in is the exact same shit: it's a square with some health and ammo scattered about and two floors of doors. Mouse is quite lacking in arena diversity. For contrast I played this right after finishing Dusk, and that game had a lot of different kinds of arenas. Some had high verticality, others were very closed in. You could go from a level that's essentially one big enemy filled playground to a slower more methodical experience to one where enemies are sniping you from all the way across the map and you have to close the gap. On top of that, it had very good weapon variety. Mouse lacks any of this so despite the locations being varied in style they all feel very similar. Go down corridor, go into square to fight more enemies. Halfway through the game new enemy types just stop showing up so the game never gets any harder after the initial levels.
The added movement mechanics got dumber as the game went on. The double jump was fairly useful, the tailcopter less so, and the rest were "use this when we tell you to faggot"-style abilities. They literally give you an ability to climb up walls right at the end of the game for no real reason. The walls could've just been lowered one foot and the ability would be rendered completely pointless.
The story's needlessly convoluted, there's lots going on but it can all be summed up with "BMP wanted to murder a bunch of shrews." Everything else is just an excuse to get from level to level. No real interesting major reveals, in fact I'm not even sure if the main antagonist showed up outside of the prologue and ending.
Ignoring the gayshit political angle to it, why exactly is a comic in 1934 talking about the nazi party to begin with? Barely anyone cared about the Nazis then. Are the shrews supposed to be jews or catholic Irishmen or gypsies? Why wasn't it immediately obvious that the party constantly talking about how much they hate shrews was getting the cops to kidnap them? Is cheese supposed to be alcoholic or just food? Is there a cheese prohibition going on? In 1934? If so why is one of the main characters running a bar in plain sight? If the cops were onto Pepper almost immediately then why didn't they just arrest him and steal all of his evidence? Is BMP supposed to be a real threat of just a bunch of incompetent morons? I have no fucking idea what's going on in any aspect of the story. To be completely fair, I did start skipping through it after it got really boring so maybe I missed some important elements that explain everything but it really does just seem like they wanted to throw everything at the wall.
I tried to rectify this by just thinking maybe it's supposed to be like a goofy comic strip or story not taking itself that seriously and trying to play off for humor but that didn't really change anything. It still feels like a bunch of redditbabble where they feel the need to avoid glorifying or empowering the 'bad guy' in any way because it might make someone agree with him.
Some other random thoughts: the card game is boring and uninspired, Pepper's voice is annoying and his personality is grating, and the character designs are bad and a lot of them have re-used features between each other. I dunno if there's anything substantial about this game I'd recommend to anyone despite feeling 'okay' about it. I guess the first person gun animations were pretty funny.