Summary
- Release Year: 2018
- Genres: Adventure, Indie, Platform
- Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC (Microsoft Windows)
- Developers: dev4play
- Publishers: dev4play
Let’s Go Nuts! – The Squirrel-Powered Co-Op Platformer That Wants to Break Your Friendships (in the Best Way)
There’s a moment in every Let’s Go Nuts! session when the laughter stops and the yelling begins. One player has overshot a double-jump, another is frantically wall-clinging while green goo creeps upward, and the fourth is accidentally slapping allies off a crate because “I thought the punch button was the grab button!” If that sounds like chaos, you’ve got the right mental image. BeardedBrothers.Games’ 2020 indie platformer is a four-player, physics-heavy scramble that sits somewhere between Overcooked’s friendship-ending pandemonium and the breezy hop-and-bop of a Kirby spin-off. Is it deep? Not really. Is it fun? Absolutely—provided you bring the right crew and keep your sessions short enough to avoid repetition fatigue.
Gameplay: Hop, Pop, and Drop
At its core, Let’s Go Nuts! is a time-attack obstacle course. You pick one of four squirrels—ninja, knight, astronaut, or plain old hoodie-wearing rodent—then leap across moving platforms, dodge buzz-saws, and collect golden acorns before the rising sludge turns you into a furry fondue. Every stage lasts 60–90 seconds, perfect for “just one more go” mentalities. Levels are grouped into five themed worlds (Sewer, Factory, Cloudtop, etc.) with 10 stages apiece. Finish all 10 and you unlock an eleventh remix that strings them together as one long death gauntlet.
Controls are deliberately floaty: you can double-jump, wall-slide, air-dash, and ground-pound. The dash is the wildcard—tap it mid-air and you’ll lunge forward with zero steering, ideal for clutch saves or catastrophic overshoots. Mastering momentum is the skill ceiling here; miss it and you’ll ricochet between buzz-saws like a caffeinated pinball.
Co-op is drop-in local or online for up to four. Friendly fire is always on, so punches, butt-stomps, and crate-throws can—and will—knock allies into oblivion. The game scores you collectively: acorns are banked only if every player reaches the exit. That single rule transforms stages from leisurely scavenger hunts into frantic relay races where the weakest jumper becomes the team’s priority escort. It’s brilliant design for couch play: veterans naturally become bodyguards, coaching newcomers on timing while reviving them with the one-button rescue system. Online, though, the lack of voice chat on Switch makes coordination a pantomime of squirrel emotes, which is either hilarious or maddening depending on your patience.
Solo players aren’t left entirely in the cold; AI bots mimic human behavior—sometimes too well, stealing acorns or shoving you off ledges. But the campaign is clearly tuned for groups. Playing alone exposes how slight the level geometry is once you remove the social bedlam.
Graphics & Personality: Saturday-Morning Sugar Rush
Visually, Let’s Go Nuts! is a crayon box explosion. Backgrounds drip with parallax layers of cotton-candy clouds, rusted pipework, and neon goo that sloshes in real time. Character animations are exaggerated—ears flap, tails corkscrew, eyes bulge à la Tex Avery. The aesthetic sits comfortably next to recent indie hits like Fall Guys: bright, readable, instantly screenshot-able. Performance on Switch holds 60 fps in handheld with rare dips during four-player explosive crates. On a mid-tier PC (GTX 1060) we cruised at 144 fps at 1440p, though ultrawide support is missing; black bars sandwich the action.
Sound design is equally cartoonish: squeaky yelps, springy boing effects, and a soundtrack that bounces between ska trumpets and chiptunes. It’s catchy for the first 30 minutes, then quickly veers into earworm territory—fair warning if you stream with capture software; muting music loses zero gameplay cues.
Story? Barely a Premise
A mustachioed mad scientist raccoon has flooded the forest with radioactive goo. The squirrels must…collect acorns? Honestly, the intro cinematic is 12 seconds long and ends with a squirrel burping. You’re not here for lore; you’re here for the next dopamine rush of narrowly escaping death. That said, the lack of narrative stakes makes the campaign feel like a training gauntlet rather than an epic journey. By the time credits roll (about two hours for a coordinated team), you’ve unlocked only cosmetics—hats, shirts, trail FX—no new abilities or world-changing twists. It’s serviceable but hardly memorable.
Progression & Replay Value: Cosmetic Carrot on a Stick
Each stage grades you on a three-acorn scale based on collectibles and clear time. Earn enough acorns and you unlock the next world, plus coins to spend in the gacha-style “Nut Machine” that spits out random cosmetics. Duplicate items convert to shards, which craft specific gear. It’s a harmless loop that keeps completionists spinning the wheel, but because the outfits are purely visual, the sense of growth plateaus fast. Hardcore players will chase leaderboard ranks instead; every stage has both global and friend-filtered speedrun times. Watching a top-10 replay is equal parts enlightening and humiliating—pros chain air-dashes and ground-pounds to skip entire sections, revealing skips the casual eye misses.
The real longevity lies in party play. Like Mario Kart, skill gaps matter less than the hilarious volatility of four squirrels colliding on a wobbling crate. We clocked six straight hours during a test living-room session, rotating losers after each world. Fatigue only set in once every stage had three-star ratings and we’d unlocked every hat shaped like tacos or rubber ducks. After that, the game settled into “occasional palate cleanser” status—great for opening a game night, less ideal for a three-hour binge unless new content drops.
Performance, Bugs & Platform Differences
PC (Steam) is the definitive experience: uncapped framerate, ultra-low input lag, and Steam Workshop support for player-made levels. The latter is a quiet goldmine; curate by “most subscribed” and you’ll find devilish gauntlets tougher than the vanilla finale.
Nintendo Switch offers portability but at a cost: 30 fps cap in four-player docked, mild motion blur, and longer loading between stages (roughly seven seconds versus two on PC). Online co-op on Switch also suffers from 200–300 ms pseudo-delay netcode; the game rewinds missed jumps client-side, which can look jarring when you teleport back onto a platform you swear you missed. It’s playable, just not tournament-tight.
We encountered only one progression-freezing bug: on Cloudtop 9, if the host ground-pounds a crumbling pillar at the exact frame it respawns, the pillar never reappears, soft-locking the squad. Restarting the stage fixed it, and the developer has already flagged a patch in the official Discord.
Pricing & Value Proposition
Let’s Go Nuts! retails for $14.99 USD on all stores, with frequent sales dipping to $7.99. For 50 short levels and infinite user-generated ones on PC, that’s solid. Console players who can’t access Workshop content should mentally value it at the sale price; at full MSRP it’s on the upper edge for “party only” indies, especially when titles like Human Fall Flat or even Fall Guys (free-to-play) offer broader content suites. Still, if your household regularly hosts three to four players, you’ll squeeze more than a movie ticket’s worth of entertainment per hour.
Accessibility & Family Friendliness
Controls are a single jump, dash, and grab—remappable. Color-blind players can toggle high-contrast crates and acorn sparkles. Difficulty can be adjusted per save slot: “Chill” slows the goo rise and grants infinite lives, ideal for kids or drink-fueled parties. Text is fully localized in EFIGS plus Japanese, though story beats are minimal. Online play uses only pre-set emotes, eliminating open chat safety concerns for younger gamers.
Verdict: Should You Grab This Acorn?
Let’s Go Nuts! nails the “just one more run” itch thanks to crisp controls, adorable mayhem, and a co-op rule set that forces camaraderie without feeling punitive. It’s the rare platformer that’s better with inexperienced friends than solo, making it an essential party piece if your living room regularly hosts casual gamers. Hardcore platforming fans will devour the three-star requirements and Steam Workshop levels, but solo perfectionists should wait for a sale. Technical hiccups on Switch and a cosmetic-only progression system keep it from the upper echelons of indie greatness, yet for sheer laugh-out-loud moments, it’s hard to beat the sight of four squirrels in sombreros desperately high-fiving at the finish line before the goo swallows them whole.
Score: 6.8/10 – A deliciously chaotic appetizer for game night, but not the main course.
Review Score
7/10
Art
Cover Art
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