Super Motherload is a digging game about Mars, and it is better than that sounds. XGen Studios built it as a sequel to Motherload, the 2004 Adobe Flash game the studio also made, and released it on November 15, 2013. The platforms are PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PC. It asks for a lot of your evening.
You play as a pilot of a digging machine sent to Mars by Solarus Corporation, an inter-planetary mining operation that has built the infrastructure to harvest the red planet’s resources for a demanding Earth. That premise is the whole game until it isn’t. Super Motherload carries a horror science-fiction storyline, and as you descend you learn about the secrets of Mars and the strange occurrences happening throughout the various Solarus bases.
Trailer, via XGen Studios.
What Solarus Corporation Wants From You
The loop is simple. You drill, you collect minerals, you return to base when your fuel runs out. At base you refuel, repair, sell what you hauled up, and upgrade your digging machine. That is the spine of Motherload, and Super Motherload keeps it.
What the sequel adds changes the shape of a run. Underground bases act as checkpoints, so you no longer have to climb back to the surface every time your cargo bay fills. That single change removes the worst chore of the original and turns the game into something you can sink into for an hour without noticing.
Mineral smelting is the second addition. By collecting minerals in certain sequences, you create alloys. It rewards players who pay attention to what they are pulling out of the ground rather than grabbing whatever glitters.
Optional puzzles, solved with bombs, round out the new material. They are optional in the honest sense. You can finish the game without clearing them.
A World That Redraws Itself
Super Motherload is a 1 to 4-player couch co-op digging adventure, and the world is procedurally generated. It changes each time you play. That is a real promise and the game mostly keeps it — the layout shifts, so you cannot memorize a route and coast.
Couch co-op is the point of the thing. Four players around one screen, each with a mining pod, arguing about who took the last of the fuel. The game is built for that room, not for a headset.
Upgrades and supplies for your pod come as you progress and prosper. Rare Special Abilities arrive with random availability. That randomness is a feature for some and a grievance for others.
Kurtis Wiebe Wrote This
The storyline comes from Kurtis Wiebe, the Image Comics writer. The cast is fully voiced, and it is a cast of Soviet and American characters. The setting is Mars in an alternate Cold-War era, which explains the accents and the politics and the way Solarus talks about its workers.
Wiebe’s involvement is the most interesting thing on the box. The corporate optimism wears thin at roughly the rate you would want, and that is my reading of it, not something the game announces. You are told you are prospering.
The horror is not in a monster jumping out of a tunnel. It is in what the game withholds, and the game lets you work that out while you are busy drilling.
Drilling Down to the Score
The bird’s-eye isometric view keeps you oriented. You always know where you are and where the base is. For a game about going down, that clarity matters more than any flourish.
The genres XGen Studios lists are a pile: puzzle, role-playing, adventure, indie. The themes are a bigger pile: action, fantasy, science fiction, historical. Ignore the labels. This is a digging game with a story, and the story is the reason to keep digging.
Here is how the pieces rank, from the ones that carry the game to the ones you can live without:
- The checkpoint bases — the change that makes long runs possible.
- Wiebe’s storyline and the voiced Soviet and American cast.
- Procedural generation, which keeps a second run from feeling like a rerun.
- Couch co-op for up to four players, the best way to play it.
- Mineral smelting, a good system that the game under-explains.
- The bomb puzzles, fine, skippable, and they know it.
That order is the review in miniature. The top of the list is why Super Motherload works. The bottom is why it does not work better.
Where the Machine Sputters
The procedurally generated world cuts both ways. A layout that changes every run is a gift on the first night and a shrug on the fifth. There is no hand-built descent to master, no moment where you finally learn a specific tunnel the way you learn a level. You learn the systems instead, and the systems are thinner than the world they sit in.
Random Special Abilities have the same problem. Random availability is exciting when it lands and merely absent when it doesn’t. A run can be shaped by luck in ways the player cannot answer.
Smelting is the biggest missed opportunity. Collecting minerals in certain sequences to create alloys is a genuinely good idea, and the game does not teach it with any patience.
None of this is fatal. All of it is the gap between a very good small game and a great one.
Why the Co-op Matters Most
The source lists single player and multiplayer. My own view is that multiplayer is the better of the two. Super Motherload was built as a couch co-op digging adventure for one to four players, and the design keeps pointing at the couch.
Four pods in one procedurally generated Mars, sharing fuel and arguing over cargo, is a different game than one pod alone in the dark. The horror storyline lands harder with someone next to you saying the obvious thing out loud.
That is not a knock on playing solo. It is an observation about where the game’s energy actually lives. XGen Studios made a party game with a nasty streak, and the party is the part people will remember.
The Verdict on Super Motherload
Super Motherload is a sequel that understands what made Motherload work and a sequel that is willing to add. The underground checkpoint bases fix the original’s worst habit. The smelting system and the bomb puzzles show a studio trying things rather than reskinning a hit.
It is also a game that trusts randomness a little too much and explains itself a little too little. The procedurally generated Mars is a fine idea. It is not a substitute for a world somebody built by hand.
The storyline by Kurtis Wiebe, with a fully voiced cast of Soviet and American characters, is the part that will outlast the drilling. It gives the loop a reason beyond the loop. You are not just collecting minerals for Solarus Corporation. You are finding out what Solarus Corporation is.
My own verdict, and not one the source supplies: the game is easy to recommend and hard to love without reservation. It is thin on polish in the places that matter and rich in atmosphere in the places that matter more. Play it with three friends if you can.
Super Motherload gets 7.2 of 10.
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