MOTHERGUNSHIP: FORGE Critic Reviews

Overall, Mothergunship: Forge comes out of the gate strong and gets more fun with each subsequent run.

Mothergunship: Forge delivers a clean roguelite experience, with a snappy loop, an innovative spin on its genre, and fun gunplay. It's not the biggest game on the Quest — let alone in its genre — but what it lacks in content, it makes up for in fun.

MOTHERGUNSHIP: FORGE is a lot of fun. One of the best VR bullet-hell games I’ve experienced, it will have you ducking, bending and swiveling like a demon. It may lack variety and is best played in small doses (and big clear rooms), but If you like bullet-hell survival, and you’ve got a Meta Quest 2, this one is a title to check out.

Wear the headset and start shooting. And dodging. And creating absurd weapons. MOTHERGUNSHIP: FORGE is a pretty straight-forward roguelite shooter that delivers on its premise. It won’t do much more than that, but that’s fine, believe me.

Mothergunship: Forge is a classic wave shooter just like Blasters of the Universe, taking the ability to swap out weapon components to a whole new level. The variance in parts is almost like stepping into a Lego store to build your ideal model. Get far enough and the guns can get ridiculous, filling the screen with components. Then again, that’s kind of the point. It would’ve been nice to have a sandbox gallery to experiment in, even so, the variety of gameplay modes keeps the gameplay entertaining. Just don’t go in expecting a slick, tactical shooter, Mothergunship: Forge is 100% an absurdly frantic FPS.

While a different game from its prequel, Mothergunship: Forge is a great arena shooter with a strong challenge level. It takes practice to get past that first boss and into the more ornate areas, but along the way you’ll unlock perks and new weapon parts to help each run get farther into the heart of the ship. As the rooms get bigger the amount of area to keep track of grows as well, requiring you to constantly be aware of what might be coming outside the field of view. The enemies spawn in waves and don’t let up until the room is finally complete, each area a bite-size challenge that in total grow to a sizeable quest that can easily leave you sweating with the effort of keeping an eye on everything while actively dodging what you can’t step out of the way of. Destroying a mothergunship is by no means easy, but with the right weapon construction plus inhuman situational awareness the mechanical invaders might just get shot, blasted, lasered, exploded and beaten into much less-threatening piles of scrap.

Structurally, Mothergunship: Forge is a familiar VR game in an oversaturated genre. But its central feature that lets you endlessly customize a massive arsenal of weapons is so well realized that you can easily brush off any sense of deja vu. Bringing that original hook from the flatscreen game to VR completely revolutionizes how the mechanic works, and you’ll find yourself coming back for runs time and again not just to progress further in the game but simply to see what weapon of unparalleled destruction you can whip up next. Much of Mothergunship: Forge is a tried and true VR shooter, but when you bolt-on that extra grenade launcher and power it up with a fleet of lava mines, what’s old is new again.