December 30, 2023 - Day 364 - NewPlay Bonus Review
Total NewPlays: 397

Game: MOTHERGUNSHIP

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Jul 17, 2018
Installation Date: Sep 7, 2019
Unplayed: 1576d (4y3m24d)
Playtime: 16m

MOTHERGUNSHIP is a bullet-hell FPS built in the Unreal Engine.

I immediately ran into problems when I tried to run it, because it did not want to play well with multiple monitors, insisting on running on the left-most monitor (which isn't my main). No options in-game to choose which monitor to run on.

Putting it into a lower resolution and windowed mode somehow made things worse, because it pushed the window chrome AND the back button off the top and bottom of the screen, respectively.

Eventually I got it running on the main monitor, and away we went. You're a nameless pleb dropped into combat on a spaceship, receiving instructions from an army General, and a tech, delivered by VO and a text-box in the middle of the screen.

You're wearing some kind of exo-suit, and you can see your robotic hands at the bottom of the screen, and you're sent off to start punching sci-fi cartoonish turrets.

When you die (oh, and you will die), you're immediately resurrected to keep fighting, with the "General" lampshading this.

A few rooms in, and you can start buying gun parts with the coins you collect, and then you can build and rebuild your weapons, into whatever wild assemblies you can imagine.

I was pretty tired last night, and it's only just occurred to me that the reason I couldn't buy parts in one of the shops was that I didn't have enough coins. There was just an error box icon that would appear when I tried to pick up gun parts, which I thought meant I'd run out of room or something. It didn't make it clear *why* I was getting that icon.

Which highlights one of the issues with the game. The ship(s) are bright and colourful with a lot going on, and the UI just kind of tends to blend in with everything else on screen.

I don't usually highlight the engine that the game is built in, but sometimes games have a certain "feel" to them that immediately registers as the game engine, and when I checked, I wasn't surprised to find it was an Unreal based game (no Unreal splash at the start, though!).

If bullet-hell shooters are your thing, this might be worth picking up on special, but I probably won't be back; they're not my thing, so for me MOTHERGUNSHIP is just a bit:

2: Meh

#MOTHERGUNSHIP #FPS #BulletHell #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay