MOTHERGUNSHIP is a self-described bullet hell, rogue-like, first person shooter where you craft your own guns, fight gigantic bosses and defeat an alien armada that conquered earth. What in the the actual hell isn’t there to love about that!?
The team at Terrible Posture Games and Grip Digital have crafted the perfect spiritual successor to Tower of Guns and this time around they’ve upped the ante in every way. The game looks and sounds absolutely gorgeous and you’ll spend hours and hours taking the fight back to the alien scum that invaded your home.
Story
As mentioned, the story is simple – Alien gunships have taken over earth and you are tasked with taking the fight back to them. Following orders from The Colonel and his allies you move from ship to ship completing missions with the end goal always in sight – defeat the MOTHERGUNSHIP! The writing here is top notch and, considering the game is a fast-paced shooter from hell, the characters and their humor keep things light. You’ll find yourself constantly laughing at what they have to say. Along with the main missions that will move the story are various side quests. Some of these will require you to use contractually obligated load outs and some will allow you to choose a starting load out like the main missions.
Gameplay
Gameplay starts off slowly and eases you into the action. First up is a brief series of tutorial levels that help you not only get used to the action, but to the games biggest and brightest feature – weapon crafting. We’ll touch more on this later, but weapon crafting is truly the heart of the game. During the tutorial you’ll not only learn the basics, but you are unable to die so that you can just focus on learning what you’ll need to succeed in destroying the MOTHERGUNSHIP.
After the tutorial you’ll find yourself back at HQ where you go between missions to select your next destination and pick the best loadout to take with you. During the first three missions you will continue to unlock new features to further ease you into the game. These consist of the Armory where you can upgrade your character, the Shooting Range where you build and test new weapons and finally the Black Market where you can buy lost gun parts that are more powerful than your current level.
By the end of the game you’ll unlock all sorts of new modes that will help you do everything from grind for new coins to a sandbox mode that will let you craft weapons with any part you’ve found throughout the game.
Each ship consists of multiple rooms that you must complete to hit their self-destruct button and return to your HQ. While more coins and XP will be gained by destroying all forms of enemy life in each room, exit doors can be opened by shooting them and, at times, you may need to flee the room to progress if there are just too many enemies to defeat. Coins can be used to buy gun parts and health and XP by collecting purple crystals, which you’ll be able to trade in to upgrade your character. If you die during a level, you’ll lose all the gun parts that you gained to that point. Fortunately, grinding out some side missions will help you regain gun parts that you can use during your main missions. Since these tend to be easier than the story missions they are a good way to earn extra experience and collect gun parts.
The controls feel great on the PC build that we received for review, but having played an early version last year on PS4 they also feel great with a controller. Since you have the ability to dual wield weapons you fire the left-handed gun with the left trigger or left mouse button and the right with the coinciding buttons on the right. Each weapon feels different and you’ll need to become accustom to how the bullets spray and drop for each gun as you put them together in crazy combos so that you can take out as many enemies as you can at once.
Crafting
As we mentioned, crafting is really the heart of the game. When crafting the ultimate gun think of it in a Lego-like modular system. You can fit any piece together providing they would fit in the physical space, have an open connector to attach to and the barrels must face the right direction. There are three different gun-part categories: barrels, splitters and caps. Each part that you add or take away from your gun can have an impact on the behavior of your weapon. Along with making sure that the pieces all fit within the physical space each part that you add to your gun has a shot cost associated with it and adding too many big components can cost you a price. By adding to many pieces with high shot cost can cost you everything from fire rate to mobility issues. Lucky for you there will be plenty of opportunity to try out all sorts of weapon combinations throughout the campaign and on the firing range.
Crafting is simple even though it takes a lot to make the perfect weapon. The first thing you need to do is select a socket, then select any part from your available parts menu and add it to the socket. Repeat these steps until you either run out of available parts or sockets. A preview of your weapon will appear, and you can turn it around and look at it from all angles. If you have trouble getting a piece to fit, you can rotate each part as well helping it to fit just right. You can remove and add pieces as you see fit until your gun is perfect. It’s best to continually upgrade your gun from room to room to increase your chances against your foes as the difficulty contuse to ramp up leading you to each boss fight.
Recommendation: MOTHERGUNSHIP is a great follow up to Tower of Guns. Anyone who played and liked that game will feel right at home here and will love this game. Any fan of fast-paced first person shooters should also sink their teeth into the game. There is a ton of content here for the price point, $24.99, and regardless of which system you are playing on you’ll be getting your money worth and then some. Fans of Quake, Doom and Unreal Tournament will enjoy playing through the solo campaign or bringing along a friend when Co-op hits down the line. Right now, Co-op is slated to be added to the game at some point in August. You won’t have long to wait now for MOTHERGUNSHIP because the game launches on July 17 on PC, PS4 and XBOX one.
*MOTHERGUNSHIP was provided to the reviewer by the publishing company but this fact did not alter the reviewer’s opinion*
Check out our Review Guide to see what we criteria we use to score games.
