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.
