Mushroom Men – The Spore Wars [Wii]

Posted June 18, 2009 by maceman in Reviews, Wii.

Reviewed on the Nintendo Wii

Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars is a miniature 3D action/adventure platformer. I say miniature as it is played out from a 3-inch high perspective with some really original characters and themes that make for good eye candy throughout the game. The whole world is intriguing as you set out on your adventure playing through gardens, grass, logs, trees and pipes, and over tabletops, sinks, toilets and other household objects. When playing you really do get the feeling you have been shrunk and sucked into the world from a Mushrooms perspective.

The whole concept makes you think somebody has slipped a special kind of mushroom in your tea before you started playing. The story is that Plants and Mushrooms were brought to life by the dust of a Meteorite that crash-landed on earth. For a time all the mushrooms lived in harmony until the poisonous ones (Amanitas and Lepiota) got greedy and started hoarding the precious meteorite rocks for themselves and demanded tribute from the edible peaceful fungi (Morels and Boletes). Civil war erupted and the Amanitas started taking hostages and doing nasty things to animals and plants alike.

You take control of a lone vigilante Pax, a special fungi/mushroom who has the power to absorb meteorites. After accidentally absorbing the town’s sacred piece of space rock he is sent on a mission from the magic mushroom (sage) of the village to replace it and inadvertently save the entire race of good fungi. As well as coming to the rescue of other mushrooms and plants being held hostage by your evil counterparts, you also need eradicate killer wasps, green eyed hypnotized killer mice, rats, moles and rabbits along the way.

The game takes themes from Kung Fu movies, Star Wars and even “Big trouble in little China” and the levels are really well designed with a lot of effort put into the look of the game. It makes good use of lighting and earthly colours and is one of the best-looking games on the Wii so far, with excellent atmosphere, original concepts and imaginative flair. The game’s look is complemented by a superb atmospheric backing sound and soundtrack. With Les Claypool — of Primus fame — adding his special brand of sound and instrument manipulation that perfectly suits this game.

The gameplay, however, is similar to that found in the original Crash Bandicoot platform games; The combat system that is used to defeat most of the mushroom enemies just seems repetitive and empty as you shake the remote to bash, jab and swing the nunchuk, roll to evade, and then shake some more to defeat them before they turn you into mushroom sauce. Other enemies and bosses are slightly harder and you need to find creative ways to defeat them and rely more on simple tactics and other methods.

The weapon building system — of collecting everyday household items (scavs), like razor blades, toothpicks, needles, etc., scattered around the levels, to build gradually and piece together bigger and better weapons — is an excellent idea and easy to implicate. Weapons like the buzz saw and the, light saber inspired, Space Gun look great and are fun to use.  Meteorite chunks also need to be found in each level, often in hard to reach and hidden places, to receive upgrades to Pax’s health and powers.

There are a few creative ways of getting from A to B within the levels, there is the sticky hand where you point the remote at something like a bottle top and reverse bungi jump yourself to a higher platform, and then there are others, which actually take advantage of the Wii’s unique control system, where you can point at certain plants and leaves to make them either bend to your will, propel you upwards or become erect to be used as a platform.

But the stand out power is what is called “Sporekenisis,” or as I call it, “the Sporce,” where you pick up objects like baseballs with glowing green spots, hold the trigger to grip it and then flick the remote to throw it at enemies or knock through walls. It is also used to activate switches and solve basic puzzles and although this is excellent to implicate it is highly under-used.

Pax uses his mushroom head/cap in few creative ways as well, by either tilting it as a shield or as a Mary Poppins umbrella gliding from platform to platform. It is also used to indicate how much damage you have taken, with pieces of your little mushroom cap coming off with every hit you take slowly leaving your little brain vulnerable until it is totally exposed and you die. You need to whack glowing green plants or dead green glowing animals ,scattered around the place, to absorb the green spore goo oozing from their carcasses to regenerate health, protect your brain and also to refill your “Sporce” power meter.

Unfortunately the camera can be off-putting, especially in battles, as you have to use the directional pad to look up and down, then manually flick the camera back behind, interrupting the flow of the game. Within the general game it would have been better to have the camera slowly pan up, down or across when you point the remote to the top, bottom or sides of the screen, with an auto camera, in the midst of battle, rather than having to flick the camera behind using the minus button.

The adventure aspect is the real highlight of the gameplay though, as it actually requires a little bit of thinking and gives you a sense of achievement, rather than just bashing and shaking your way through levels. There are interesting things to do in each section, like helping a fellow fungi to escape from a toilet room in his pool float air balloon, collecting parts to build a rocket, reactivating broken machinery and triggering switches to find your way through a maze of doors and passage ways.

While primarily a single player game, there are limited functions for an additional player in Spore Wars. While the extra player gets their own pointer on screen it only serves as a helping hand function and they are limited to using “The Sporce” or healing Pax. While this is a useful feature I would have preferred an additional split screen battle mode.

There are also a couple of mini games thrown in for good measure, but they seem slightly out of place. It would have been better to have more mini-games but implemented as a special game mode with a 2-player split screen option accessible from the main menu. This would have added a bit more replay value, as the only thing to do once finished is to collect all the meteorite chunks you missed or find every part and create every weapon.

Spore Wars has numerous elements that could have made it a classic game; it’s funny and entertaining, with superb graphics and sound, but the game’s just too simplistic to keep any hardened platform fan interested for any length of time. The fighting element needed to be more diverse and the game made more challenging overall. It is because of this, that Spore Wars will only appeal to the casual gamer or Wii owners who just want to have a bit of fun.

Tagged as Mushroom Men, Mushroom Men - the Spore Wars, red fly studio, SouthPeak Games, The Spore Wars, THQ