Another Indie game which surprised me at PAX East was Mothergunship; a bullet hell FPS where the player is trying to take out an alien fleet that’s taken over the world. Before you can assault the main ship, literally the Mothergunship, you must take out the small ships by boarding and destroying them. While at PAX East I played the demo, which was destroying one of these ships.
Being this is a bullet-hell one of the first roadblocks I encountered were some, I wouldn’t call them bullets really, they were more like giant mortar shells being shot at me. Like these things were seriously huge, and just running by them wasn’t enough because they’d follow where I went. Luckily for me, the turrets which were shooting them could be destroyed with the gun I was given at the start.
Even though I had this powerful gun to start off with I quickly realized the goal of each room really was just to get through it, so I could continue on my way to where I could set the self-destruct on the ship. Most of the time the best strategy was to simply figure out where the exit was and run there as fast as possible. This wasn’t always as easy as it sounds though. There was a good amount of variety to where the doors I needed to go through were located and there were a few times I had to circuit a room more than once to find the exit.
I started off the level with one gun but picked up a second soon after and dual wielding the guns was all around fun. One interesting thing about Mothergunship is you aren’t just limited to what guns are found as you wander through the game. Every gun can be modified, and every mod also can further be modified. I’m talking about taking a machine gun and adding a flamethrower and then adding a stabilizer and another machine gun on it again. It gets straight up crazy. The only limitation seemed to be I had to rotate the mods, so they fit together and weren’t cutting into each other.
I should also mention throughout this level there was another character, that sort of looked like a frog in his portrait, who was talking to me through the coms and explaining stuff. I’m pretty sure the demo was the tutorial for the game because it did take me through all the basic systems and how to use them. I should mention the writing and VO for all of this was not only entertaining but funny. Even on a noisy convention hall floor, the VO came across as being a real bright spot.
