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Put a one-hit-wonder on top for insane penetration effect and insane damage mod,. Well, hope not to run into that 10 spider tanks room.
Platforms: PC (Reviewed), PlayStation 4, Xbox OneOn paper, Grip Digital and Terrible Posture Games’ new shooter title Mothergunship seemed like just the sort of game I would relish playing: a roguelike bullet-hell first-person shooter that allows players to craft and modify their own custom gun loadouts. In some regards, I did enjoy my time playing Grip Digital’s latest title since, under the right conditions, it can make for some crazy chaotic fun.However, far too often I would also find my fun quickly derailed by certain gameplay mechanics, to the point where I can really only recommend Mothergunship to the most patient of gamers, and even then that recommendation comes with much hesitation. Playing by another’s rules. Mothergunship’s meager story elements manage to do just enough world-building that the player feels like there’s a purpose behind all the running and gunning they’ll inevitably have to do. Mothergunship does the barest minimum in explaining how its various gameplay systems work, and that holds especially true for what is intended to be its flagship feature: gun crafting. Ideally, the system allows players to combine various connector parts, gun barrels, and gun-enhancing caps to create some truly wild firearms.Imagine having a gun on one arm that fires saw blades, homing rockets, and spike balls, while your other arm fires shotgun blasts, lasers, and a flamethrower.
As long as you have the requisite parts, the game’s crafting component allows for some truly awesome creations though realizing the true potential of your in-game arsenal is often easier said than done.For starters, your custom guns don’t carry over between missions, forcing you to keep assembling and reassembling new weapons each time you start a new mission. Other frustrating elements that ultimately do more to ruin a player’s fun rather than enhance it include strict room transitions that don’t allow players to revisit rooms they’ve already been through (each mission is divided into a series of segmented rooms). Several times I would accidently back into a between-rooms connector hallway while trying to avoid enemy fire, thus unintentionally locking myself out of a potential boon I intended to use like a shop or an ability upgrade that an enemy dropped.Then there’s the fact that lost player health doesn’t auto-regenerate, forcing the player to buy health-restoring items from shops, and god help you if you’re unlucky enough to go through several enemy-laden rooms with no shops in them, which can happen. Defeated enemies can technically drop health pickups as well, but the pickups give so little health back, and require you to expose yourself to additional enemy fire to get them, that it’s oftentimes not even worth it.It is also possible to gain more health permanently by utilizing Mothergunship’s shallow RPG progression mechanics (XP gained from completing missions can be used to up your health, number of jumps, or movement speed), but again, the difference is so marginal that it means little in the long run.
![Mothergunship Mods Mothergunship Mods](http://media.indiedb.com/images/members/5/4070/4069697/profile/Mothergunship_Screenshot_20.jpg)
Besides, all the health in the world doesn’t mean squat if a group of floating robot mines sneaks up on you from behind and one-shots you in a fiery explosion. Oh, and did I mention that if you die at any point in a mission (some missions can take as many as 15-20 minutes), you lose all of your equipped gun parts and have to redo the mission from the beginning?Again, I get that Grip Digital wanted to really embrace the whole bullet-hell angle, but when all of the above frustrations I mentioned come together, they make for an experience that peppers brief moments of cathartic fun into an overtly frustrating execution. Lost in space.
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