Craft ridiculous gunstacks in Mothergunship's demo

"Give the guy a gun and he's Superman," Humpty Dumpty said. "Give him two and he's God." I'd like to add to this, "Give 'em five guns stacked up and clicked together into one huge megagun, and they may well be playing Mothergunship."

That's the next bullet hell first-person shooter from the creator of 2014's Tower Of Guns, and this time it'll have players build our own guns. A bit like Serious Sam: Double D, we snap bits and bobs into honking great guns covering half the screen. You can see quite how that works in the 'Gun Crafting Range' demo released today.

The demo starts us with a basic gun and a few bits, letting us craft a very simple gun with only two eight-barrel chainguns and a two-barrel blaster. Tiny. Barely even recognisable as a weapon. Off you to go to small testing arenas to blast turrets, shoot robodogs, and dodge so very many shots and missiles, snatching cash out baddies' guts along the way.

Back to the crafting range to buy more bits, upgrade your gun, back to the test range to shoot more baddies... before long, you might have built a vast shotgun/chaingun/railgun/mine/grenade/flamethrower which spaffs beams, explosions, and hearts all over the place while you not only double-jump but quintuple-jump. Enemies get tougher too, obvs, with later ones having abilities to buff allies, control the space, and generally make bullet hell hellish.

Megaguns consume your recharging ammo faster, mind, so you might want to build for balance - or whack on upgrades which boost energy drops from enemies and just go wild.

I enjoyed building those guns and blasting those baddies. I don't know quite how it'll come together in the full game, as these arenas are quite small and the demo is obviously meant to show off the crafting. But I enjoyed playing it. Funnier than I expected, too.

You can grab the Mothergunship Gun Crafting Range for free from Steam.

Mothergunship is due to launch in full later this year. While you're here, hey, perhaps you might fancy reading our dearly departed Adam's Tower Of Guns review.