Mother Hub Impression
Mother Hub encapsulates what made 2000s shooters great; uncomplicated shooting, amazing atmosphere and unwavering ambition. Past some rough edges and a short runtime is a terrific game that belies great talent. Give it a shot if you're craving a quick hit of FPS goodness.
Foreword
I love video games. If I could, all I would do is write about, play and work on my own games. Unfortunately, I am bound by the cruel rules of reality.
On occasion, I find a game I love but might not have the fortitude to dedicate a whole review to it. To remedy this sad state of affairs, I am messing around with a new format. "Impressions" are just barely edited word vomit.
That's right; it's even less formal than my regular articles. That's saying something after I coined the term "snuffatunities" in a prior review. I also want these impressions to be shorter, 300-400 words, if that.
It is always astonishing to me what a single developer can accomplish in this era of gaming. Breakout success stories like Stardew Valley and Undertale might dominate popular culture — rightly so, they're both incredible games — but that's the tip of the iceberg.
Mother Hub is another product of a solo developer who dedicated 10 years of their life to making their vision a reality. Based solely on what I've read on the store page and their patch notes, they are extremely passionate about their creation.
So what about the game? Is it any good? Fuck yeah, it is — did you miss the name of this fucken website? It has its rough edges, but so do most AAA games these days. For a solo developer, the graphics and sound are really well done. The fidelity is dated, but the atmosphere is excellent.
It's almost entirely voice-acted too. I found most of the voice acting was good — some of it was great. One of the highlights was a rat-obsessed robot. Rat mayonnaise will haunt me until I draw my last breath.
The music was fine, it fit the atmosphere but wasn't very memorable. Altogether, the audio was above average, but it did give away some of the scares when you can hear a very loud mouth-breather zombie through several walls.
Aside from the barely threatening slow zombies, there is an astonishing amount of enemy variety for such a short game. They make good fodder for your guns and the shooting is satisfying. Enemies explode into comical blood geysers before the limited physics implementation spaghettifies them. The AI isn't too smart so it never felt like much of a challenge but there were a few butt-clenchingly tense fights.
I can't say it enough: there can never be too many atmospheric, linear shooters. I feel spoiled because I just played Metal Garden and now Mother Hub. Growing up playing a fuckload of PC-centric shooters in the 2000s has given me a bias.
Mother Hub encapsulates what made those games great; uncomplicated shooting, amazing atmosphere and unwavering ambition. Past some rough edges and a short runtime is a terrific game that belies great talent. Give it a shot if you're craving a quick hit of FPS goodness.
