Birthed by German indie studio Maschinen-Mensch, Mother Machine has been marketed as a breath of fresh air in the cooperative multiplayer space. From its trailer alone, you’ll gain a strong understanding of its accessible, community-centric gameplay and devilish sense of humor, which lend it an undeniable charm. While I can’t say that Mother Machine is a bait-and-switch—it mostly does what it says on the tin—I walked away from it feeling incredibly disappointed.
Mother Machine is a hodgepodge of influences. There’s clear BOTW and Mario DNA in its simple platforming, stamina management, and food-based buff systems; it’s vaguely roguelike, leveraging procedural generation and randomized upgrades; it even has a touch of Edmund McMillan-esque dark comedy, especially at the beginning of the game, when the titular Mother Machine first reveals that she can essentially endlessly clone her “children.”
When Mother Machine is firing on all cylinders, these influences merge into something fun, and even unique: the game never feels derivative. But it so rarely fires on all cylinders, and in all likelihood, you’ll see everything it has to offer after just a few hours. Mother Machine is clearly designed to be played for longer than this, however, as even its main campaign continues long after its core mechanics have worn out their welcome. Maschinen-Mensch seems to have designs to make this an endlessly replayable cooperative experience, but Mother Machine currently doesn’t have the staying power to justify more than an hour or two of gameplay.
Mother Machine Is Cute, Clever, and Ultimately Dull
A simple premise usually works best, especially for a multiplayer game. Mother Machine is built around this age-old chestnut, giving players a brief introduction to its game world—an alien planet overrun by rogue automatons—before setting them loose on a series of missions. Players can embark on a total of six different mission types from their home base, either solo or with up to four others. It’s during these missions that the majority of Mother Machine‘s gameplay takes place, as you’ll be tasked with completing challenges, collecting upgrade resources, and ultimately activating satellites, which will progress the main campaign.
These missions can be rather fun, at least at first. The game has great movement mechanics, and like any good platformer, there’s a strong sense of gravity and momentum behind every jump or roll. There’s combat in the mix as well, though it is far less satisfying and boils down to spamming a single attack button while occasionally rolling away to avoid taking damage. Rather than a linear progression model, Mother Machine allows you to unlock various different mutations, such as a flatulence-fueled double-jump or a group heal, but only one can be active at a time. It’s a system that’s quite similar to the badges in Super Mario Wonder, promising to offer new twists on existing playstyles, serving the goals of replayability and player expression. I was so excited to see what Mother Machine had in store for me once I grasped this elegant gameplay loop, but it wound up falling significantly short of my expectations.
It Doesn’t Take Long for Mother Machine to Feel Long in the Tooth
Perhaps the most crucial flaw of the game, and the greatest source of disappointment is its utter lack of variety. There are such minor differences between each procedurally generated level that it’s hard to realize they were procedurally generated.Then there are the aforementioned mission types, which feel half-baked. For the most part, they are all identical to one another, their greatest differences often boiling down to what short-lived task you need to complete in order to access an airlock or remove an obstacle. These are variations expected within established mission types, not variations that constitute an entirely new mission type on their own.
The Battery Delivery mission type is perhaps the only exception to this blight of sameness, as players have to work together to protect a battery-carrying drone, rather than just completing an isolated task to bypass an obstacle.
In my eleven hours of playtime, I encountered a grand total of two boss types, including the final boss. There were no variations or twists on these boss designs, mind you—they were quite literally the same two fights, arriving right on schedule, with no variables that would augment them or make them feel more refreshing. The Misty Grove DLC, a temporarily free expansion to the base game, doesn’t offer any more variety, sadly: it doesn’t introduce new mission types, nor does it offer meaningfully distinct level design. Misty Grove is essentially just an alternate coat of paint for the base game.
There is a clear intention behind Mother Machine‘s barebones progression system, but it’s a creative choice that doesn’t do the aforementioned blandness any favors. Having access to just one special ability at a time could work well in a game with great level variety, but with each level and game mode feeling only superficially different already, this limited mechanical depth only exacerbates the game’s sense of monotony. It doesn’t help that many of the mutations are either useless, like an ability to make the player-character glow ever-so-slightly, or simply not fun to play with, like an ability to conjure a projectile fruit that is readily available in the environment already. After collecting all these mutations, which can happen before you’re even halfway through the campaign, the only rewards for collecting resources come from a small pool of cosmetics.
As a result, there’s not much motivation for continued gameplay once the main campaign is complete, and this wouldn’t be so bad if the main campaign were worth the price of admission, but it’s not. The campaign is composed of five story missions, separated by an ever-increasing gap of satellite requirements, AKA the regular, repetitive gameplay. These five missions are quite trim, each lasting about as long as a standard one, which is underwhelming. But the real problem is that they are mechanically indistinguishable from the regular missions: players must navigate to various airlocks and make their way past a few challenges, which are also identical to the challenges found in the other missions.
The only major difference between story missions and normal ones are the exposition dumps that come by way of Mother Machine’s dialog and various text logs. But this narrative is not nearly substantial or creative enough to pick up the immense slack left behind by Mother Machine‘s gameplay. You can give Maschinen-Mensch a lot of grace for other shortcomings—it’s a small indie studio, after all—but with the story being told mostly through text, it feels like a ball was dropped here. It doesn’t take a AAA budget to write a compelling story, and while most people wouldn’t come to a game like this for high drama, a captivating tale could have compensated for disappointing gameplay.
It should be noted that Mother Machine‘s PC performance is subpar. I reviewed the game on a computer with an RTX 4060, and I struggled to maintain a steady 60FPS above medium settings. On high settings, especially in the DLC areas, FPS would regularly drop to the 20s. I also tested the game on a Steam Deck OLED and a laptop with an RX 7600S, where performance was even worse.
Mother Machine has a lot of personality and some genuinely good ideas that just aren’t implemented well. It would be great to see what Maschinen-Mensch can do with more time and resources, but as it stands, Mother Machine feels more like a demo or proof of concept than a fully fledged game.
Reviewed on PC
- Released
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March 26, 2025
- Developer(s)
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Maschinen-Mensch
- Publisher(s)
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Maschinen-Mensch
- Chaotic fun in co-op
- Strong movement and physics systems
- Clever mechanics
- A lack of diverse game modes
- A lackluster campaign
- Monotonous gameplay
- Poor optimization on PC
Mother Machine is currently available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. Game Rant was provided a Steam code for this review.