MOTHERGUNSHIP

I spent a long evening with MOTHERGUNSHIP half-expecting a straightforward arcade shooter and got, instead, something that kept interrupting itself to hand me a parts bin and say: make something ridiculous. That pivot - from action to construction and back again - is what defines the whole experience, and it's what makes this game worth talking about even years after its 2018 release. The core loop is a roguelite FPS where you board procedurally arranged alien ships, clear room after room of robotic enemies called the Archivists, and spend whatever coins drop from their wreckage at in-dungeon shops on new gun components. The components snap together through a modular connector system - barrels must face forward, pieces cannot overlap - and within those constraints you can assemble things no reasonable armourer would sanction: a triple-barrelled lightning shotgun bolted to a lava container, or a chaingun cluster arranged around a sawblade cannon. The crafting bench feels tactile and genuinely creative, and those moments when a build clicks - when you realize the spread on your new contraption is covering a whole room while you maintain a 40-jump airborne streak - carry a particular low-fi joy that very few shooters manufacture. Mobility is equally central: the jump count can be upgraded well beyond what physics would allow, and circle-strafing, rocket-jumping, and constant vertical repositioning are not optional extras but survival requirements. Where the game's handcraft shows most is in its tone. The Colonel and his crew, including Chief Gungineer Wilkins and a supporting cast that includes a self-aware anthropomorphic frog lifted straight from a Star Fox parody, deliver genuinely funny fourth-wall-brushing dialogue between missions. The story is thin by design, and the game knows it; the voice cast leans into the absurdity with a dead seriousness that lands more often than it has any right to. The soundtrack and sound design have their own personality too - pulsy, mechanical, loud in the right registers when a room floods with bullets. The honest friction comes from three places. First, enemy variety is limited. Around a dozen robot types share the same techno-ship colour palette, and by the back half of the campaign you have seen every pattern they produce. Second, the RNG governing what parts appear in shops can work against the crafting fantasy rather than enabling it: mission-part limits and the energy-cost scaling on larger builds mean the game sometimes discourages the enormous abominations it advertises. Losing your best components on death and then facing a grind to rebuild them is genuinely punishing, with no difficulty options to soften the curve post-campaign. Third, the endgame - an endless mode and a truncated set of no-death challenge runs - feels undercooked next to the main story, which itself clocks in around six to seven hours. For players who take bullet-hell FPS seriously and want the extra dimension of build creativity to play with, MOTHERGUNSHIP delivers a specific pleasure that nothing else quite replicates. Go in knowing it is best played in shorter sessions, that the story mode is the strongest part, and that the Endless mode is a separate kind of commitment requiring a higher RNG tolerance. If you have a friend to bring into the online co-op, the chaos scales in ways that make both the frustrations and the triumphs feel shared. It is a game that peaks brilliantly and then shows its seams, which is a more interesting problem than never peaking at all.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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