MOTHERGUNSHIP from Terrible Posture Games and Grip Digital is a first-person shooter in which you get to build your own weapons – and that is as crazy as it sounds! Learn more about it in our MOTHERGUNSHIP review!
MOTHERGUNSHIP is, at its heart, a bullet hell/first-person shooter. This means that things will get crazy hectic very fast, so you better be ready! The game gets you started with a short tutorial section with some signs that make you jump with the X button, so you can get up a small ledge, to then make you double jump by pressing X again in mid-air to reach a taller platform – you can also use the L1 button instead of the X button. Oh, and then you’ll be told to do a triple jump because that’s the type of game this is. You can even get some jump upgrades during your run to add more jumps to your jump! The next step will be to use your fists with the L2 and R2 buttons to punch some enemies to get money to buy parts for crafting your first weapon.
Joe’s Arm and Armory is where you’ll do the crafting of your weapons, selecting a socket to access your inventory to select parts. You’ll then select the parts you’ve picked up at the store from the three available tabs: Connectors which add more sockets, Caps which add effects, and Barrels which, as expected, add more ammo. Every part you add will require more energy to be activated, so the more stuff you add, the longer you’ll have to wait for it to recharge so you can use it again.
Taking this into consideration, I ended up crafting a small but deadly gun with a multi-barrel and a ricochet mod, for a nice weapon that dealt 40 damage per second, firing ten shots per second, with a total 17 energy requirement – not bad for a starter weapon, but definitely not something that could take me to the end of my adventure. And then I got a second weapon for my left hand, and this is when things started to get very interesting. I was able to buy more parts and modify each weapon in my hand with more stuff, removing the multi-barrel so that I could place an extra socket on which I put the multi-barrel and a second smaller single shot barrel that sent a missile out that dealt twice the damage per shot.
Before starting a mission, you’ll be able to take some gun parts with you, but you need to be careful about what you select. Why? Because any parts you bring into a mission will be lost if you end up dying, and in a game like MOTHERGUNSHIP, you’re going to die… a lot. Completing a mission will also reward you with new parts for your guns, so you’ll need to balance things. As you progress through a mission, you’ll get to learn how much of dangerous each new room you visit will be, thanks to the handy threat level indicator on the right side of the door.
As you defeat enemies, you can gain XP, and once you get enough, you’ll be able to level up. Leveling up will allow you to obtain upgrade points you can use to improve your armor so that you have extra starting jumps, more movement speed, more max health, more energy, a faster energy recharge rate, more damage, being able to detect secrets around you, and more. Because of this, I suggest you take on some side-missions here and there between proper story missions so that you can gain some extra XP and some extra weapon parts to have a better chance of surviving the increasingly more difficult stages.
Something weird happened while I was playing MOTHERGUNSHIP. I’ve been playing games since back when home Pong machines were a thing, playing many a first-person shooter, but while playing this one… I started to feel a bit off. After one particular session that lasted a couple of hours, I felt worse than I had felt during previous sessions with the game, and that’s when it hit me: I was experiencing motion sickness. This is something that I hadn’t experienced before while playing a first-person game, so there must be something going on between the fast-paced running around a room to stay alive, being able jump so many times in a row in different direction, and all the enemies and the projectiles, lasers and other stuff they threw at me. Plus, you know, the glowing lava I had to avoid in some of the rooms at the same time.
Having said that, I still recommend that you play MOTHERGUNSHIP on PlayStation 4. The build-your-own-guns gameplay mechanic is fun, and it forces you to think a bit outside the box as you balance how you use the parts you purchase with those you’re sometimes forced to use for a mission to create something that is useful and not too powerful to use for a long period of time
Disclaimer
This MOTHERGUNSHIP review is based on a PlayStation 4 copy provided by Grip Digital.
