Mothergunship: Forge by developer and publisher Terrible Posture Games—PC (SteamVR) review written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes.
Having originally released as a first person shooter / roguelike / bullet hell back in 2018, Terrible Posture Games is back again with more Mothergunship action. Taking you from behind the screen and putting you right into the action within VR, Mothergunship: Forge is all about the same thing but from a less safe space as it drops you right in that middle of the action instead of keeping you safely behind a screen.
Full disclosure? I jumped many times and this isn't even a horror experience. Like in real life though, when you don't expect something to be somewhere it's going to scare the crap out of you. Thankfully you can punch things but more on that shortly.
Mothergunship: Forge is an intense experience that doesn't hesitate to throw you right into the action. Starting off with nothing more than your fists for a tutorial, you'll be punching and blasting your way through various rooms with various enemies. The goal? To both hopefully complete the challenges ahead and defeat the Mothergunship by any means necessary. Even if that means equipping your guns with 80s style boomboxes and cowboy stetsons.
The great thing about Mothergunship is that it's easy to pick a starting point. Loading up an adventure will bring you right into the action where you'll literally be using your two hands to put crazy weapons together. Split between gun parts and connectors, there's no shortage of insanity as long as what you have on hand, oh yes, I went there, fits together with neat little arrows of what direction a node can be attached.
The best part of this is that all of these connections go straight onto your primary connectors which are attached to your in game gloves. This means if you move your hand, you move your weapon. Have a connector that has three horizontal outputs? You can attach three different items. Three guns. Two guns and a power up. Two power ups and a gun. Three power ups if this connector is already attached to another. The options become limitless once you start to get new pieces and if you're not happy with the loadout? Swap it all around as everything is plug and play!
This flexibility makes combat that much easier, or that much more chaotic, depending on what you have on hand. While most guns will shoot forward, and some may lob such as grenade launchers, not all connectors will be offering straight shots. Some are at angles, some will be literally shooting to the left or the right of what's currently forward, and others will be up or down. So while you're standing in the game and looking around to see what's currently attacking you, you'll also have to pay attention to how your hands are placed in order to get the best shot(s) possible.
I can also easily state for the record that I will never star in a John Woo film. Not with my performances!
Looking through a screen is one thing as you're detached from the experience regardless of how immersive it could be. Standing in a room with a virtual reality headset though? There's nowhere to run as you're now in it for better, or worse! With this came something that I appreciated. While pulling the trigger guns blazing in the direction of anything shooting at you, the only thing you need to worry about not getting hit is your head. Not your body, not where your legs would potentially be. Just your head.
This makes the rest of the action a lot smoother as Mothergunship: Forge is a bullet hell and oh, let me tell you, it lives up to that name especially in boss fights. So only having to move your head means that you can easily play standing up in a small to medium sized room, or, sitting in a chair if you're willing to strafe a bit by pushing your chair wheels over whenever necessary. It also means that you don't have to really worry about moving around with the joysticks on your motion controllers as just a good step or two should be good enough most of the time… as long as you see it coming.
For the moments that you don't see coming, that's where either your fists or your health bar come in. In terms of enemy types, you have turrets, flyers and what I'll call crawlers. With your eyes "up" you can miss these still sizable metal munchers that make me think of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mousers, or Digimon's Metal Greymon. This is where you'll want to make sure that you have a bit of pressure on your controller sensors to activate your fist weapons and you'll need to be ready to punch, straight or uppercut, if needed. It's a good thing to have as knee jerk reactions will often save your health meter.
This is where I'll take a second to lead in to maybe my only potential suggestion as I don't have any complaints on Mothergunship: Forge. Because of how I was standing, it took me two actual runs to find out where my health meter was or where my currency was being listed for whenever I would get to a shop. More on that shortly. These are displayed on the back of your gloves instead of a heads up display. While it does keep the experience super clean as there's nothing to distract you… you do have to either extend your arms or look down to see how many more hits you can potentially take.
In between all of the gunning and punching, after each room has been cleared of enemies, you'll get a choice to pick a door forward. Do you want to go towards cash? Gun parts? Shops? Purple embershards... crystals... stuff? More on those shortly but NPCs make up your mind! Or do you want to tackle a challenge which ups the difficulty of what comes next? There's no real right choice other than what makes sense for you at that moment in time.
Finally, the last element to Mothergunship: Forge are these purple "crystals" that can be acquired. Collected either by defeating enemies or by choosing them as a room reward, the accumulation will unlock new weapon options for you on your next run. Available from the main hub menu, you can see what can be unlocked once you have collected enough of these such as what was called a pizza launcher. Looked like a pizza launcher but shot out metal saw disks of destruction. Side to these, other perks such as starting off with extra health can also be obtained if you perform certain actions that are listed which only help to give you a head start on your next challenge run.
Summary
As a fan of Roguelikes and still a beginner in the realms of VR, I thought that Terrible Poster Games' Mothergunship: Forge was a solid experience. Solid visuals, scary bosses when they come up to your face, loads, and I mean LOADS, of weapons and weapon combinations to choose from, there's more than enough to keep anyone going for hours at a time all from the… safety of your living space. Hard to be safe when you're technically in another world!
Score: 8.25 / 10
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