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MOTHERGUNSHIP Review

by Amr (@siegarettes)

• MOTHERGUNSHIP
  
• Developer- Grip Digital, Terrible Posture Games
  
• Publisher- Grip Digital
  
• PC, PS4, Xbox one
  

A few hours into MOTHERGUNSHIP and I’d already built the most absurd gun I’ve ever seen. A collection chainguns, triangle chainguns, and shotguns, all stacked together and jutting out on makeshift arms while connected to a modifier that had them going at an absurd rate of fire. Then of course on the other hand I had another gun, loaded with a flamethrower, grenade launcher, fireworks launcher and two cannons just in case it wasn’t enough. On top of that I had TEN DOUBLE JUMPS, letting me stay in the air for a good 20 seconds before I touched the floor. And this was still just the opening of the game.

MOTHERGUNSHIP frequently allowed me to build these overpowered weapons while keeping a sense of vulnerability and tension alive. If you’re fighting an army of killer robots, it’s only natural to have an army’s worth of artillery in your hands. To accomplish this balance Terrible Posture Games has taken lessons from the roguelike structure of their previous game, Tower of Guns. They’ve taken the strengths of the roguelike, while excising the the tiresome aspects that induce repetition.

So while MOTHERGUNSHIP might sell itself as a bullet hell style experience, it often feels more in line with the action RPG stylings of games like Diablo or Torchlight. There’s a similar emphasis on controlling chaos, creating a build and finding the right combinations of weapon effects. It even pops up damage numbers when you shoot an enemy and give you the damage per second on the weapon build screen. 

Missions are structured to allow a constant sense of progress while maintaining the roguelike’s high stakes and constantly shifting approach. You’re generally given multiple spaceships to tackle, each with their own mission, usually a main objective that will push the story forward, and side missions that are useful for grinding for resources. Each of missions’ layouts are procedurally generated, and will have a certain amount of slots open for weapon parts. These parts are taken from a stock you accumulate as you successfully complete missions. Fail a mission and you’ll lose any parts you take with you. 

This allows for the feeling of beginning a new run without the extended play sessions and crushing loss of progress that can hamper the excitement of roguelikes. The shortened missions also encourages experimentation, since you need to find a build that’s useful for maybe 10-20 minutes, rather than having to carry you through an hour long marathon with constantly dwindling resources. Some missions even require you to start with certain parts, challenging you to try certain combinations of guns you’d otherwise ignore. 

The weapon system itself carries over that sense of improvisation. Limited weapon part slots means balancing between carrying powerful weapons and the connectors needed to attach them to your power armor. These connectors will feel familiar to fans of mech building games, as they supply hardpoints where weapons and other parts can be connected. These need to be built so that no parts collide, which means working creatively with whatever resources on hand. 

It’s a bit like trying to connect a very dangerous chain of extension cords. Some smaller weapons fit nicely in the available slots, and some of them are the aggravating large bricks that need to be relegated to the ends so they don’t cover two slots, or worse, connected to another extension cord plugged into the first. So you might end up with a shotgun and fireworks launcher comfortably sitting on the base connector, while several other connectors jut upwards and outwards trying to prevent absurdly large cannonball and lava launchers from obstructing the other weapons. 

There are also a number of drawbacks to each weapon. A chaingun might fire fast, but inaccurately, and larger weapons consume a lot of energy, giving you less shots before having to reload. These can be balanced out by adding caps which modify weapon effects, but those also take up valuable slots. You may not be lucky enough to find those caps either. After your initial loadout is chosen you’ll have to find other parts by buying them from the in-mission shops with currency scrounged from enemies. Shops are frequent, but their selection is random, so you’ll have to strategize around what pieces are available. 

Combined with the weapon building systems, this enhances MOTHERGUNSHIP’s improvisational feel. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and build an incredible and efficient killing machine, but most of the time you’ll have some absurd combination that might spray in every direction or fire off a thousands bullets in a second and immediately deplete all your energy when you fire it. This is how you end up feeling tense and overpowered. You might be able to destroy everything in a second, but the second it takes you to reload might be long enough for the next wave of flying buzzsaws to inch closer to taking your head off. 

There are a few issues that hamper this tension. The biggest by far are the loads in between rooms. Each room is connected by a loading corridor, which locks you in for a moment while presumably the other room generates. It’s not a long time, but its enough to slow the momentum and, alongside the way enemies materialize as you walk in, break the illusion that these ships are actual locations. In addition the color schemes and graphical effects can sometimes blend together, making bullets and enemies harder to read. Certain weapon effects also didn’t appear at all on lower graphics settings, making weapons like flamethrowers invisible. 

The story also plays a lot into stock characters, with a sort of irreverent cartoon vibe. There’s the anxious AI, the rah rah patriot General, and the exasperated engineer girl, with a few more characters added along the way. It’s never more than set dressing, and its function is more to give context and throw in jokes between challenge rooms. Thankfully the writing is better than the usual embarrassing standard videogame humor often holds itself to, and the actors do a good job delivering the dialogue that’s there. It got a few smirks out of me, even if it’s largely totally familiar. 

MOTHERGUNSHIP as whole carries that sense of familiarity. Behind the compelling structure and the novelty of the gun building, it’s a game that I immediately settled into. The beats of the gunplay, movement and progression all draw on familiar roguelike concepts. What MOTHERGUNSHIP does with them is sand off the rough edges, keeping the tension and variation that makes them compelling, without the frustration. Then it adds a stack of guns on it, then another, and another. And honestly, that’s everything I wanted from it.