Title: Mothergunship PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows [reviewed]
Developer: Grip Digital, Terrible Posture Games
Publisher: Grip Digital
Genre: Action
Release: July 17, 2018
MSRP: $24.99
MOTHERGUNSHIP from the folk at Grip Digital is an interesting take on a few different popular genres. On its face you get a first-person shooter, but just under the surface you get some pretty interesting mechanics that make this anything but another generic FPS.
The game takes the popular roguelike aspect of RPG games that people seem to love and slaps it into the core FPS experience. This would be interesting enough, but it wouldn’t be the first to do this in the past few years. What is new –at least in my understanding– is that MOTHERGUNSHIP also throws in a system of weapon customization that makes the game feel pretty special.
MOTHERGUNSHIP is clearly not following the “less is more” style of game design, throwing the entire kitchen sink into on package. More often than not, the fact that a game is so overloaded with conflicting ideas is a death sentence, but MOTHERGUNSHIP manages to just about pull it off.
The games is best described as a endless shooter. Take something like a SHMUP and throw it into the 3D space of an FPS and you get a pretty good idea of what you can expect with MOTHERGUNSHIP. The game wastes no time throwing you into the fire with bullets whizzing past from all directions. It’s a pretty thrilling experience right of the bat.
The best bit of the whole adventure is in the customization aspect of your weapons. In each stage you can visit a workshop and purchase upgrades and build your own weapons. Each ship you venture on has a few workshops strewn about and using them correctly is vital to your success.
As you kill enemies you’ll earn XP, money, and all sorts of powerups (you can snag jump icons that let you jump up to 40 times!) to help you reach the core of each ship. The money collected allows you to buy additional weapon barrels and connectors that are required in the building of your arsenal. You add a connector and then you can add a barrel into one of the available slots.
Building your weapons is a lot of fun and you can spend a good amount of time figuring out the best combination and how to make it all fit. MOTHERGUNSHIP allows the player to carry a weapon in each hand so finding out what works best is a lot of fun and a good bit of a challenge and not everything fits depending on your connectors.
On top of the weapon barrels and connectors, you also can manage special ability add-ons that also fit into open slots and can upgrade your weapons or give you some special abilities. Perhaps you slap on a rocket launcher and attach an add-on that allows your rockets to bounce around each stage. There are tons of combinations.
And you’ll need the best weapons as you are going to be dying quite a bit. MOTHERGUNSHIP does not hold back and it doesn’t take long before enemies fill the screen. As a big SHMUP fan I was pretty ready for this, but because this is an FPS in a three-dimensional space, the games difficulty spikes very early.
Because the game is a roguelike each stage you play is going to be a totally new and different experience. You never really know what you are going to get next. This is a lot of fun, but it also can make for a pretty nerve-racking experience. You might get a few pretty simple rooms but then walk into a room and be destroyed in seconds.
Where the game gets you is in death. When you die you lose all the weapons and goodies that you brought into the level with you. This gives MOTHERGUNSHIP this really interesting risk/reward style of gameplay. Do you take all your best goods onto a new ship, or do you maybe play it a bit more conservative lest you encounter something altogether new?
But I found that this sort of limits the game in the creations that you can make. MOTHERGUNSHIP seems to be all about the customizable weapons you can slap together, but with death taking them all away you feel like making something wild and crazy to often be too much of a risk.
This feels intentional at some points as the combinations aren’t as endless as they first seem. Sure, you can go fairly nuts, but you’ll quickly get a fair understanding of what really works best and you end up building the same sort of weapons over and over again. It sort of stinks that MOTHERGUNSHIP touts its weapons customization system but then makes doing so more of a disadvantage.
But once you purchase a weapon, connector, or add-on they will be stored in the main computer so you’ll have access to them when to jump into a new level. But don’t expect to take you 12 barrel laser shotgun back into the fray as you’ll only be able to take a limited number of parts back into a stage, essentially starting you from scratch.
Thankfully the stages are all really well paced. Each ship that you enter has a bunch of rooms that you must clear before the next room opens up. But this isn’t a linear affair as often multiple doors will open up letting you choose where you go next.
Some of these rooms are challenge rooms and ask certain things of the player, adding to the risk/reward style of gameplay. Maybe you play it more straightforward or you risk it all in a challenge room, knowing there will be more rooms after and you might be pretty low on health.
The main rooms you’ll be looking out for are the workshop rooms that let you spend you money of new barrels and upgrades. Each ship has a few of these so you’ll be adding to your weapons pretty regularly. The only problem is that you’ll often build you dream gun and then realize the stage is over just after, thus never letting you really have fun with some of you works of arts .
Still, It’s all a good bit of fun, but the real enjoyment comes from the boss fights that the game throws at you. You’ll be dodging and jumping all about while massive mechanical monstrosities rain hell down upon you. It’s pure madness at times, and even when you die you’ll probably be having a good time doing it.
Unfortunately the graphics make things harder than it needs to be. In a 2D SHMUP there might be hundreds of enemies coming at you but chances are they are each unique and well-defined. Maybe their bullets are a certain color or they follow some pattern, but you can figure them out.
Since MOTHERGUNSHIP is an FPS and the action is happening all over the place this sort of gameplay becomes pretty messy. Often you have no idea where bullet fire is coming from and you’ll be doing more guessing and playing by feel than with any real strategy.
And because of the graphics employed all the enemies blend into their surroundings and each other far too much for my liking. There were times where I was shooting the extra objects around rooms that were just there to look pretty. Often times enemies can’t be clearly seen until they are right on top of you. It’s a fast game and because of this strategy seems trumped by luck in many instances. It’s a bit too spray and pray for my tastes.
That said, what I really did like –and found interesting for a game of this nature– was the story that MOTHERGUNSHIP pushes. It’s really well planned out and is played for laughs; laughs that genuinely happen instead of making the game feel full of cringe. It also helps keep the player moving forward as the roguelike nature of the game can feel a bit repetitive at times.
What’s great is that the developers seem to be really behind the game and say they will be offering up a lot of extras in updates and the weeks and months go by. They note that more gun barrels, connectors and ability upgrades are on the way along with a promised co-op mode hitting sometime in August.
MOTHERGUNSHIP might not be the game you find yourself spending hours on at a time, but it’s clearly one that you can easily jump into every now and again and have a bloody good time. Just be ready to a brutal time.
Final Score:
3.5/5
A copy of this game was provided for this review
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