mother gunship. Funny bagel with shooter elements / Overclockers.ua

On July 17, 2018, Terrible Posture Games released Mothergunship, a first-person shooter with roguelike elements and meticulous gun customization. The project is an ideological follower of Serious Sam and Doom, but with a simplified plot and an abundance of self-irony. In this review, we will tell you what the creators have done and what needs to be worked on.

The plot of the Mothergunship is banal to disgrace. The developers, apparently, deliberately made the story as clichéd as possible in order to make fun of themselves. In an indefinite future, alien pieces of iron under the control of artificial intelligence attacked the Earth. Among the thousands of enemy ships in the background looms a giant mother ship – the same Mothergunship. Having lost almost everything, it dawned on the resistance that in order to defeat the AI, it is necessary to destroy their “mother”.

And of course, an inexperienced gamer is chosen for this mission. The colonel, his assistant and a sad robot put the player on a collision course, allocate a real space base (almost everyone was killed anyway and there is a lot of empty living space), give a military exoskeleton, a starter set of modules for weapons and send him on a “simple” task – to destroy the mother ship and save humanity.

Each new mission has a different goal: steal the main ship’s blueprints or data hard drive, deal with a giant robot boss, scout enemy forces, and so on. Each quest is given a limited number of weapons. The location itself is a series of rooms with mechanical enemies of varying difficulty, shops and the end point of the mission, from where the hero returns to the base.

Loading randomly generated locations is long, but you forget about it, because you laugh like a horse. For some time now, the creators have come up with funny characters, hilarious dialogues, and through them they ridicule space fiction as a genre, other similar games, gamers, themselves, local AI and everything they see. Moreover, in the Russian localization, the jokes are translated perfectly and, perhaps, increase the power of humor.

In addition to story missions, the game has side quests where you can earn skill points, money, or new parts for the megagun. Here you have to be careful. If a gamer dies on a mission, he loses the obtained weapon, but the experience and money remain. Therefore, instead of another profit, you can get on your favorite machine gun or laser, and go on the main mission with what is left.

The Mothergunship feature is detailed customization of weapons on special workbenches. A full-fledged gun here is divided into connectors, barrels and attachments. The first ones are the basis of our monster, with a different number of inputs. Guns or amplifiers (nozzles) cling to them.

In theory, the game allows you to create bulky mega-guns with wild damage and a design a la geeky space marine. In fact, such a system has two BUT. Firstly, energy is spent for each shot from a weapon. And the more trunks are hung on the hand, the faster it will end with one click on the virtual trigger. Therefore, an adequate option would be to create weapons with two or three barrels of different specifics, for example, a machine gun, a laser and a grenade launcher in order to inflict maximum damage on enemies and at the same time not wait for the restoration of the energy scale every two seconds.

Secondly, the gamer collects coins from the killed enemies and spends them in a local store to replenish health, new trunks or power-ups. But for five to ten rooms you can’t save a lot of gold, so making a monster cannon doesn’t work out purely in practice.

By the end of the story campaign, with an increase in the amount of energy and the speed of its recovery, it is possible to collect something more or less epic. But it is better to assemble a base for each hand with trunks of close and long range of destruction and calm down your inner inventor. And if you still feel itchy, then at the base there is a shooting range and a workbench, where you can collect whatever your heart desires and shoot from it for educational purposes.

In addition to energy, pumping points are spent on increasing health, the number of jumps, resistance to the environment and falls. At first glance, it is scarce, but more is not required here.

After completing the initial tasks and meeting the boss in full screen, it turns out that Mothergunship is not about shooting, but about running with dodges and jumps. Local levels are randomly crammed with either hordes of enemies that fire rockets, volleys of lava, energy and other rubbish, or a couple of three stupid turrets that are killed at once. In the local fight, Her Majesty luck rules the ball, and what lies ahead, a vyvizhopnaya location or a dull grind, is unknown before entering there.

Between the rooms, the level of danger is written on the doors, but in fact the second or fifth location may be easier to pass than the first. So the ability to accurately shoot in the Mothergunship is not the main thing, but at the levels the reaction speed, the ability to briskly sparkle with your heels and find an angle where none of the hundreds of rockets sent as a gift will reach you helps.

Cheating is also allowed in Mothergun – almost every room in the game, except for the fight with the boss, you can just run through and not touch anyone. The downside of this tactic is the lack of skill points, gold and fun.

The roguelike component of the game, on the one hand, simplifies the work of the creators and makes hundreds of different rooms without any problems. But after the first hours, the situation of the project becomes boring, and the army of identical opponents makes you sick. It’s good that the creators also know about this, so the story company with side missions takes no more than 4-5 hours. Further, the gamer is free to continue pumping the exoskeleton, pervert in the craft of epic weapons and wait for the cooperative, which will be brought up in August.

Mothergunship looks nice and simple. The game was created on Unreal Engine 4, but it is clear that the developers have not implemented all the features of the engine, which is why the graphics lack a clear picture and detail. But the project is loyal to weak PCs and easily runs at maximum speed even with a 1 GB video card. This also prevents the game from freezing, slowing down and sagging in fps.

There are no complaints about the sound either, but there is nothing to praise it for. Local music is heavy metal with lively guitar riffs and a touch of electronics. Such melodies are great as a background for this game, but do not cling to memory and do not make you want to listen to them separately.

Mothergunship is a furious and illogical shooter where the ability to run is important, not to shoot accurately. The game is distinguished by excellent humor to the point of colic in the stomach, self-irony rare in the genre, an unusual approach to the plot and a short campaign. The project lacks an abundance of opponents, diversity in locations and detail in graphics, but the game runs on ancient hardware. You shouldn’t expect anything special from Mothergunship, and let’s be honest, the game is unlikely to become the standard of the genre. But it is definitely worth a try to brighten up a couple of evenings with action and a great mood.