Uncover the truth about the evolution of mushrooms.
With its unique art style, delightful musical score and range of quirky characters, Mushroom Men: Spore Wars overflows with personality and charm. Though developer Red Fly Studio has regurgitated ideas from past platform games it has done so with style, making old ideas feel fresh and unique by infusing the Wii Remote’s motion-sensing functionality extremely well into its endearing mushroom-themed gameplay.Mushroom Men: Spore Wars is a 3D platformer with a heavy focus on collection and exploration as you make your way, jumping, gliding and bashing enemies, across its colourful universe. The unique storyline follows Pax, a member of the peaceful Bolete mushroom tribe as he travels the land seeking to bring peace to the society of warring mushroom factions. Word has it that the Spore Wars can be won by uncovering the true facts about the mushroom’s origins and four mushroom tribes embark on a race for the truth. Along the journey Pax also sets off on his own personal quest in search of parts of a meteorite that had previously crash landed on Earth and shattered into pieces creating the human-like mushroom races that now inhabit this bizarre world. The surreal storyline of Mushroom Men: Spore Wars opens things up nicely for some old-school platforming gameplay.
Gameplay in Mushroom Men involves exploring the creepy game world collecting everyday objects, such as thimbles and razer blades and then combining them to create a variety of melee and ranged weapons. Alongside other standard platforming gameplay mechanics, such as having to work out how to traverse the environment by jumping and gliding around hopping from one platform to the next, combat also plays a major role as you come face to face with a variety of enemies, including spiders, rabbits and weapon-wielding mushrooms, as well as participating in big boss battles.
The melee system, though basic, utilizes the Wii Remote well allowing you to slash and poke away with the controller intuitively. Pax responds extremely well to your hand-waggling movements and it's a fun system to use as you string together combos while mixing blocks, rolls, jump-attacks and spore powers with little effort. Weapons add a strategic element to the gameplay and are divided into four categories: slashing, bashing, thrusting, and radical. It's up to you to search the environment to bring together combinations of items to make the required weapons, for example, a PDA pointer, bubblegum and a thimble create an Iron Thumb, which is ideal for bashing the heads of attacking shrooms.
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