Yes, I did promise that this week was going to be a manga review but roughly a week ago (from the time I post this review), a new game in this series was released and I thought it would be better to get the whole series out of the way now. Plus, I am writing this while working on said manga review so get off my back here. I should probably learn how to pace myself when it comes to writing these but I stopped reading “Rookies” to write these reviews so I might as well make it worth it. With that said, let’s talk about the neon coloured bullet hell that is UBERMOSH and yes, I will be typing it like that every time.
UBERMOSH is a series that contains six games in its series now which goes in following order: UBERMOSH, UBERMOSH Black, UBERMOSH Volume 3, UBERMOSH Wraith, UBERMOSH Volume 5 and then UBERMOSH Santicide and yes, that naming convention is very uberconfusing. The base of the UBERMOSH games from the very little lore I can extract from the games is that we are in the future, you are “The Blade Saint” who has came back to the “colony” after 200 years and the “colony” demands violence so you do that by shooting the hell out of some alien looking robots with laser based weaponry and maybe the aliens you shoot are the “colony”. Yeah, the lore of UBERMOSH is super vague and I had trouble finding it because as far as I know, you only get these lore bits from the start of the original UBERMOSH game and the tutorials in latter games. In fact, it’s so lax on the lore, I had a bit of a laughing fit when I was reading the steam community post for Santicide’s release and they said that they are thankful for the community for “enjoying the lore”. Yes, we are enjoying the very vague lore you are giving us. As far as I know, this could be an intergalactic cooking show being hosted by a robotic Weasel Snipes from how little lore there is. For me, having lore is nice to have but I wish they did a more “DOOM” approach to it where the lore is there for you if you want to read it but it isn’t some super vague crap but just like “DOOM”, you can just ignore it and get to the part where you shoot demons in the face or I guess in this case, using your bright blue uberkatana to deflect lasers back at these aliens a-holes.
Gameplay wise, it’s a rather excellent bullet hell shooter. While it isn’t on rails like most other bullet hell shooters, it’s still as hard them and it’s even harder since you have to worry about what’s going on from all around you and not just in front. These aliens/cyborgs will swarm you like their Zerg ubercounterparts and they will not hesitate to shoot you which is great because you have a katana. A katana that can deflect lasers like it’s a lightsaber. Yes, you do have a katana that can deflect laser shots because this is UBERMOSH, baby. In my humble opinion, the addition of the katana is what makes this game great. While it’s hard to deflect shots and it’s probably easier to just shoot them, it’s a lot more satisfying to deflect multiple shots back into the horde as you cut them down because the colony needs their uberviolence and I don’t blame them if it’s this satisfying. The game also has different class mods you can enable in the main menu which changes up the playstyle. The standard of no class mod lets you pick up guns and use the katana with only 4 HP and is just a great starter. The Kenshi mod increases your HP to 6 but then restricts you to the katana which is more of a advantage then anything because your katana is pretty much a better gun. The Gunner mod doesn’t let you use a sword at the cost of having your guns be full auto and is great for just cheesing it up. Warlock let’s you start with the best gun at the cost of 3 HP which is in my opinion not a bad trade off. You get to start with a decent gun so if you are skilled enough, the HP limit is no handicap. They also three other classes of the names “Wraith”, “Catalyst” and “Psyker” and I have no idea what they do. They are tied to this meter called “Brainclap” and all they do is reduce the max limit on the brainclap meter at the cost of lower HP and this ties into one of my three complaints.
For me, what brings this game down is the fact it isn’t good at explaining any of the other mechanics. Like, we have meters called “Manastrike” and “Brainclap” introduced in later games and the game doesn’t explain what they are, how you fill up these meters or what the different mods do. For example, in Santicide, you can choose between “Single Strike + Shredder”, “Double Strike” and “Single, Double, Triple” and I don’t know what each one does or what they do differently. All I know is that the shredder mod just launches purple arc lasers at random. I think the series can do a lot to help explain some of these other stuffs outside of the basic controls. Since we are talking about the mechanics, I wanna talk about how much they haven’t changed these games over six games. Like, each game adds one new mechanic and a pallet swap apart from that, it’s pretty much the same game. Like, Santicide literally added a harder mode and the strike system and that’s it. It’s just a pallet swap of the original game with two new things and they charge five bucks off the bat for this. There’s a point where you should just being adding this to the original game but I hate how it’s like this. If you weren’t a smart and savvy player like me and brought the bundle while it’s cheap, keeping up with the series can get bothersome and it’s not worth it since they do very little to give you incentive to buy the sequel, even at a cheap price. And you know what, it’s a good thing these things go for five bucks each because these games have a super short shelf cycle. This is a problem with most arcade games since they are so short, they mainly based on novelty and replay ability. UBERMOSH certainly has replay ability but that’s mainly if you want to go for the achievements because if you have it’s sequel, you have no reason to go back to those original games because of complaint two. While yes, I understand the devs need the money but come on guys, it’s making your old games redundant and it kind of makes you look like an ass.
Do I still recommend UBERMOSH? That’s a certain uberyes from me with a solid 6/10 across the board because there are a well crafted series of bullet hell arcade shooters. You can pick up the associated bundle for ten bucks right now but if you only want one, I suggest going with the latest one which is Santicide at the moment and see if you can beat my highscore of 1803 in Santicide mode. If you want something slightly cheap, pick up the original or Black for like 3 bucks and you want a less confusing experience. If you want my personal recommendation, I would say go Wraith since it’s a perfect uberbalance of not being too complicated and not too simple in my opinion. Next week should be the manga review unless I end up retooling a movie review I am currently writing in English for an assessment so the upcoming weeks might be an ubermess. Remember to checkout the sidebars for my YouTube channel to watch my badly edited videos and my Steam profile if you want to stalk me.
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