Mothergunship wants to be two games at once

Mothergunship wants to be two games at once. It is a bullet-hell shooter and a gun-building sim, and it asks you to hold both ideas in your head while alien robots fill the screen with fire. The mix works more often than it should.

Trailer, via MOTHERGUNSHIP.

Joe’s Crafting Station Does the Heavy Lifting

The hook is the crafting bench. At Joe’s Crafting Station, you build a weapon from modular parts that lock into sockets. Connectors add more sockets. Barrels do the firing. Caps do funny things to your gun. Every part has to physically fit, and barrels have to face forward. That constraint is the whole game. You are not picking a loadout from a menu. You are assembling something absurd and carrying it into a fight.

A Gun No Reasonable Person Could Lift

The results get stupid fast, in the best way. Stack enough barrels and you are hauling a gun that no reasonable person could ever lift, which is the game’s own description of the ideal. The payoff is that your monstrosity is yours.

craft gun monstrosities that no reasonable person could ever lift

Procedural Levels, Cooperative Play

The levels are procedurally generated, so each run differs from the last. Mothergunship supports online cooperative play, which suits the chaos. Two players hauling homemade artillery into a randomized room is a better pitch than one player doing it alone.

When the Room Fights Back

The structure has a cost. Random layouts and bullet-hell density can wear thin when the room you get is not the room your build was made for. The game leans on your willingness to rebuild.

The Fleet, the Armada, the Mothership

The setup is thin by design. You are a resistance member pushing through a mothership that holds an alien robot armada, and the fleet hoards data. That is the whole frame. It exists to justify the next room and the next socket.

What Works and What Wears Out

Ranked by what actually holds up:

1. The crafting system — the reason to play.
2. The cooperative mode — the reason to keep playing.
3. The procedural levels — variety, but not always good variety.
4. The story frame — forgettable, and fine that way.

7.5 of 10

Mothergunship is a smart hybrid that trusts its best idea. The gun crafting is not a side system bolted onto a shooter; it is the shooter. Where it stumbles is in the spaces between builds, when a generated room punishes a weapon you spent ten minutes assembling. The game released on July 17, 2018 for Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and it earned mixed reviews. That split makes sense. If you want a tight, authored campaign, this is not it. If you want to build something ridiculous and watch it work, the sockets are waiting.

bullet hell · co-op shooter · game review · gun crafting · Mothergunship · roguelike