MOTHERGUNSHIP
Mama, I just killed a… um, rogue AI
Perhaps you like your shooters to play out at the speed of a burly COD character’s stomp, every footstep a heaving effort towards the fight. I’m not here to judge (you). Some people were just raised that way. But those who were there at the turn of the century when Doom, Quake, and Unreal strode the landscape like gods will always find a warm reassurance in games like Mothergunship and its classicId-style movement controls. This is a game about the raw sensation of moving and shooting – and doing so very, very quickly.
If you’re desperate for a plot, here’s one: aliens known as the Archivists have humanity pinned down out in the far reaches of space. By shooting your way through a succession of randomly generated spaceships, you’ll eventually reach the eponymous Mothergunship and just, like, shut down the whole malevolent foe forever. (Told you it was a game about shooting. 1)
Each of those ships – and boy, there are a lot of them – is constructed using a series of semi-random rooms, and within these are specific challenges like going 40 seconds without taking damage. If you remember 2016’s Strafe and its roguelike/shooter blend you have a decent reference point for Mothergunship, but unlike Strafe this game doesn’t buckle under the weight of its own marketing. It’s an unassuming shooter where the only complexity comes in making your own guns2 out of bits and bobs you find dotted around on Archivist ships. That provides just enough complexity to keep you moving forwards, while the rest of your grey matter’s simply enjoying the absurd onslaught each fight presents. Simple, effective, cha. Phil Iwaniuk