Mothership Forever

Finally... Fraxy 2.0...

Jokes aside, this is a neat little game with heavy inspiration from Warning Forever. It's not much, but I'm satisfied with just blasting ships into oblivion. I recommend this if you just want to do exactly that.

Also *wow* the Fraxy parts graphics are just right there aren't they.

edit: I mentioned other modes being in development initially but I almost immediately found out I have to beat the story mode first. lol oops.

Really cool game, it reminds me of Warning Forever. The weapon balance is pretty bad though, using the minigun and blaster combo completely breaks the game and makes story mode a 30 minute cakewalk and endless mode an endurance run until you get bored. There is no counter to them. You can shred the enemy to pieces from a really long distance and easily wipe out missile swarms that get sent at you.

I think the enemy should counter these by getting shields that can block bullets but let other weapons like torpedoes and missiles through. They should also do way less damage to the ship itself, maybe with a few shots the blaster could temporarily disable weapons and defences that you hit which would open up the opportunity to hit it with other weapons that would have been countered otherwise. The miniguns main purpose could be for shooting down enemy missiles which I find is already super handy thing to have

The time limit you have to destroy the enemy also makes the balance worse, because why would you pick any weapons other than the two that can kill it insanely fast from long range. Right now these two weapons solve way too many problems at once while the other six get countered really hard either by the ships defences or just taking too long to destroy the enemy ship in time once it gets big enough. One more thing and I don't know if it's a problem with the game or just me but it doesn't seem to save your progress. Any time I close the game the other two modes are locked again and I have to do the story mode all over again

I originally gave a negative review because of a gamebreaking bug, but patch 1.10 has (mostly) fixed it: more on that later.

This game is basically a spiritual successor to Warning Forever: you're a tiny spaceship, you're fighting a big spaceship, and every time you kill the big spaceship it comes back bigger, stronger, and with some adaptations to defeat your strategy.
The idea is solid, the execution is decent, and as a result the game is fun: there are, however, a few problems.

First of all, Warning Forever did it better: you had VERY limited space, so you were forced to stay dangerously close to the enemy's weapons, and as the enemy grew bigger your room for maneuvers became smaller and smaller.
Here, you can always kite the enemy from a safe-ish range, and as it gets bigger and slower to turn it becomes really easy to run laps around it and stay outside its firing arcs.

Second, the game goes on for too long: Warning Forever escalated quickly and often killed you before you could even see all types of weapon the enemy could field, here you'll run out of new stuff 10 minutes into the 30 minutes main story.

Third, the enemy "adapts" in really weird and exploitable ways: the last 20 minutes of the main story seem to mostly end up with big enemies carrying almost exclusively missile launchers, an incredibly exploitable weapon since you can outrun them easily and make it so they crash into the enemy.
And what happens when you kill the enemy with its own missiles? It "adapts" by bringing even more missiles, eventually getting so big it will hit itself with its own missiles every time it fires, you won't even have to fire a shot and it'll kill itself just fine.

Fourth, the physics bug: the reason behind my original negative review, this bug results in the enemy ship spazzing out and flying off-screen at ludicrous speeds.
Back then, this was a very common bug that resulted in a game over as you were unable to catch up with the enemy within the time limit.
Now, the bug is less common and the enemy ship usually self-destructs pretty quickly when the bug happens, so it's not that big of a problem.

Overall, the game is fun but it could be much better.

Game is fun, but there is a game breaking bug where the mothership will sometimes just flip the fuck out and start spinning insanely fast while flying all over the map. It ends up destroying itself and sometimes knocking you out of the map. I would love this game if that didn't happen. It happens randomly, but also more if you use the railgun.

Awesome gem with game breaking bug that causes the mothership to consistently warp away. By the time I get to it, the game over gravity gun it has is ready and zaps me. The other game modes are locked behind finishing the main mode that has this game breaking bug.

Posting about this on the forum has yielded no replies in the approx. 6 weeks since I posted as of today.

This suck because the bug notwithstanding, this game is a real gem!

Lack luster, with an annoying amount of jank. The central gimmick is excellent, but the game is over all capstone project level. For the cost I am not mad, but if your looking for more than a "well that was neat, uninstall." look elsewhere.

ENTERING CRUISE MODE ENTERING FIGHT MODE ENTERING CRUISE MODE ENTERING FIGHT MODE

A fun twin stick shooter

You are a small spaceship killing big motherships.Every round one.
Every kill let the next mothership being bigger.
You level up your weapons.
That's it.
Nice game but not enough for 7.79€!
Wait for a Sale!

Cool concept that lacks quite a few basic features:

No volume controls
No control customization
No graphic controls other than a high-low slider
All inputs you're told about are in controller form (luckily the controls are rather intuitive)
If you die in story mode you have to start from scratch (grating tutorial voiceover included)

I imagine these will all be fixed soonish. Really, the game should have launched with all that and more. It's kinda hilarious that they had a "should have been done before launch" patch and it included like no basic customization options.

Once this is all squared away the game will be a fun time sink.

This is like being a corpse camper but in space. I has great sound effects and surreal colors. Different weapon combinations to fit everyone's play style. Great fit for something like the Steamdeck too.

Mothership Forever is a cool concept and there is tons of polish overall, but gameplay polish was neglected. It plays unbalanced in a not effectively play-tested way. Clunky navigation on controller, which works on keyboard/mouse but the tooltips are for controller, despite unplugging it and restarting. The weapons are only 2 equipped at a time and takes you out of the intended intensity of the gameplay when changing weapons in the paused state. The pause state is good as weapon swapping is currently designed, but things are never really stationary, so doesn't work and needs better key mapping rather than requiring a pause with how real time twinstick style the gameplay is. I would rather have static (modifiable) key assignments for each weapon and pressing one that is unequipped will equip it, then using it again when ready will fire it, or some easy fix like that (prefer just having them all ready with various hotkeys and adjust balance as necessary for that). Weird that settings don't even show hotkeys for keyboard or controller, that is unacceptable design/UI on release.

Aside from lack of settings to even see static controls (tooltip at top left and tutorial each time is not a real "feature"), the issues mentioned so far aren't thaaat major. Where this game fully earns the negative review is it forces you to do the exact same thing over and over: fighting a single boss that itself just respawns over and over. The cumulative adaptations to how you defeated it in past is kinda cool, definitely makes it harder, but you don't restart at the adaptation stage it was at, you restart at the beginning of the tutorial-like story line each time, slowly unlocking everything. That is the part that is incredibly annoying as a player and feels like wasted time to get to the meat of the game. I am sure something unlocks after beating the first 30 min tutorial style story mode, but restarting at the beginning each time with such repetitiveness and being punished for going too fast (adapts each kill and respawns, but doesn't change 30 min timer) is simply not fun and feels like a chore by the 3rd or 4th try. Also, as a side note, the asteroid mechanics are incredibly imbalanced. Using repulsion on an asteroid does a ton of damage if hitting the boss but is also countered super hard when adapting to it, feels completely out of place and unfinished leaving me feeling it is better to avoid entirely so at least the asteroid can be intermittently used as barriers to block shots, etc. This out of place balance is fine to adapt to and targeting the hard counter aspects before using them may create depth to future playthroughs and how far you can go in an endless mode, but this gets back to starting from scratch each time is not fun.

Recommend having player at least respawn at previous adaptation level, have options to save at checkpoint timers, or separate tutorial from meat of game. I am also at a loss for why it was decided that forcing a player to wait for reinforcements and not play the game was a good design decision. I literally sit there with a hull of a boss ship watching the time as I wait to finish it.

Overall, this game needs more playtesting and feedback to adjust a whole lot of things, as well as addition of some variation/novelty to progress and not punish the player for being good at game, likely literally skip to max time off from reinforcement arrival if boss ship is completely disabled or something, anything: waiting is not fun. Boss only mechanics is also not a huge fun factor as I want a level to play with my toys on, feel like i am exploring, and collecting loot of sorts etc.

I purchased Mothership Forever based on a Reddit post from the developer.

It's a great twin stick shooter that builds on the classic "Warning Forever" and takes some inspiration from arcade classic "Sinistar", adding some additional play modes, different weapons and even a story.

The enemy mothership evolves each time you take it down, returning bigger and better armed each time. Based upon the weapons you use against it; start using homing missiles and then in the next iteration the mothership will have improved point defenses, forcing you to adapt your tactics during that round. A constant countdown runs for each mothership that prevents you from hanging back safely too much - you need to stay on the offensive and take it down relatively quickly, but if you go in too fast it will evolve faster than you can keep up. This creates a nice tension during the playthrough and keeps things on edge the whole time.

Weapons are varied and allow for a few different approaches, from sniping with a railgun to flinging asteroids and mines at the enemy. Weapons unlock steadily during each playthrough, giving you more tools to take down the ever-growing mothership.

Graphics are a nice mix of 2D sprites and particle effects - not too over the top so that it obscures the action - but still attractive.

The only gripe I've had are that you can't turn off controller vibration so using the minigun results in near-constant vibration. The other issue I had was already fixed by the developer - great support!

I've really enjoyed the short time playing so far. It's not the deepest game, but it's very satisfying for a short run, just like Warning Forever. Two thumbs up!

Just did one playthrough--haven't done the endless or rogue mode, or the higher difficulty. Really fun and simple game. Nice way to burn some time in between stuff in my schedule and well-worth the price.