Bad Posture Games is a studio that likes to makes games about guns. A few years ago, they brought us the first-person bullet-hell shooter, Tower of Guns. Now Bad Posture Games is back with a not-quite-sequel. I suppose it is more of a spiritual successor to the Tower of Guns game. So Mothergunship feels a lot like Tower of Guns, but with enough differences for a whole new experience.
The biggest difference between Tower of Guns and Mothergunship is the addition of gun-crafting. Your character in Mothergunship will not find guns all around the levels. The player collects gun parts instead. You can go to any crafting station on a given level to build ridiculously awesome gun-arms for your character. I cannot state strongly enough how fun this is!
Early on in the levels, you might simply have a machine gun on one arm and maybe a grenade launcher on the other. However, by the time you get to the end of the level, you will own some ridiculous Chaingun/Rocket Launcher/Laser Gun on one arm and something equally ridiculous on the other. Crafting guns for your character is a great idea and Mothergunship makes it super easy. Guns are built from three basic part types: connectors, barrels, and caps. Connectors allow you to add more barrels and caps. Barrels are the firing mechanism and come in many varieties from machine-guns and rocket launchers to rail guns and flamethrowers. Caps give your gun-arm certain benefits like more damage or less energy consumption.
Forget about having to scramble around levels searching for ammo. Mothergunship ditches the idea of limited ammo in favor of a renewable resource. Each of your gun-arms will use a portion of the energy bar with each shot. If you only have one barrel on your arm, that arm won’t chew up much energy per shot. On the other hand, the more ridiculous your gun-arm gets, the more energy it consumes. Combining this with the deep crafting system means you need some real strategy in creating the perfect gun-arm. I found a good strategy is having one arm that uses low amounts of energy for multiple enemies. The other arm should be an energy-sucking arsenal of barrels for bosses and larger enemies. Each person can likely come up with completely different gun-arms to work through the game’s missions.
In Tower of Guns, you simply start your way through a tower that generates as you go and there was little story in the game. In Mothergunship, you get a story for your character and some supporting cast. You also own spaceship that acts as a hub in between tackling the missions of the game. Each mission you select from the hub will take you into a procedurally generated level similar to those in Tower of Guns. However, Mothergunship levels are shorter affairs you complete before moving on to the next mission. Some are story missions that drive you through the story while side missions supply you with gun-parts to help your progression.
When you start a mission in Mothergunship, you choose a limited number of gun-parts from your stash to take with you. You find more in the level to help build your arsenal, and any parts you find come with you back to the hub if you succeed. If you fail, you will be sent back to the hub, but you lose any gun parts you found in the level along with any that you brought with you when you started it. Missions also sometimes have special requirements, like giving you specific gun parts that you must use on the level.
My only knock on Mothergunship is that its story mode is too short. The main story ends very abruptly and was a bit underwhelming. However, there is an endless mode that unlocks and allows continued enjoyment beyond story mode.
Mothergunship Overall: 8/10
You will get some deja-vu in this game if you played Tower of Guns, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Tower of Guns was a great game, but a little thin on content. Mothergunship feels more like a fully realized version of Tower of Guns than a sequel. With the addition of missions, story, and especially the gun-crafting, Mothergunship towers over its predecessor. This is a game worth checking out.
NOTE: The PS4 version of Mothergunship was played for this review. Mothergunship is also available now for PC and Xbox One. Corey spent about 15 hours with Mothergunship, completing the story and playing in endless mode.
