Mothergunship Xbox One review: DOOM meets Rogue, and it's glorious

"Roguelike" games are becoming more common, just something you don't see often is ane designed as a starting time-person shooter (FPS). This is what y'all get with Mothergunship — and between the DOOM-inspired mechanics and the experience of crafting new guns in each randomly-generated level, this game guarantees a good time.

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An arsenal with limitless potential

In Mothergunship, you take control of a soldier tasked with boarding the space vessels of alien robots and murdering them. To accomplish this, you need two things: a adept suit of armor, and some weapons. Luckily, the game emphasizes both, and frequently gives you opportunities to create your own loadouts. You will randomly come by weapons caches when inside enemy ships that contain gun parts for you lot to collect, and your armor can be upgraded between missions.

The freedom allowed when crafting is incredible, peculiarly with firearms. By limiting the process to three parts — connectors, barrels, and statistic-altering mods — making a weapon is easy and fun. If you lot wanted to, you could create a gun with forty barrels. Crazy things like this are balanced out by Mothergunship's energy system. Every bit you make weapons more ridiculous, they burn through free energy quicker and y'all'll need to wait for information technology to recharge frequently. In this regard, yous'll be balancing raw power with the length of time yous can shoot.

When you've finished making your new toys, it's time to play with them. The gunplay in Mothergunship is fluid, as is your movement; information technology reminded me of DOOM 2022. Mastering both mechanics is crucial to success equally you will ofttimes be fighting over a hundred enemies. Dodging the unending barrage of enemy attacks while taking them out with your own is heady and intense, and thanks to the randomly-generated design of Mothergunship's levels, no two areas are the same.

However, it isn't without some issues. The random nature of the game is mostly a good thing, but there are times where yous're faced with a situation where it's incommunicable for you to win based on whether or non you got lucky and picked the right guns for the fight. If this happens several times in a row, information technology can be frustrating, but that but happened once during my playthrough.

Flawed beauty

In terms of presentation, Mothergunship is a mixed bag. The game is visually impressive, taking inspiration from DOOM's hell-themed aesthetic, and the sound design is great. All of your weapons audio incredible, no thing which you're firing. However, the musical score is bland and information technology does more than to hurt the experience than it helps. The hardcore metallic music is a slap-up backdrop to the action for a while, just the lack of diverseness inside the composition makes it annoying to listen to after playing for an hour.

Performance wise, Mothergunship is by and large solid. The framerate tin can driblet a little flake during fights with lots of enemies in modest areas, but it's rarely enough to hinder gameplay.

Last thoughts on Mothergunship for Xbox One

Betwixt the intuitive crafting and stiff gameplay design, Mothergunship'due south successes heavily outweigh its bug. Information technology'due south definitely worth checking out.

Pros:

Superb gameplay design.
Excellent crafting organization.
Solid functioning.

Cons:

Depression quality music.
Tin can sometimes exist unfair

Mothergunship is bachelor at present on Xbox One for $24.99.

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