Mushroom Men Preview

By: Derek Serafin

Monday April 07, 2008

Red Fly Studios unveiled the upcoming Wii and DS titles at EIEIO 2008!
Getting in to EIEIO 2008, Gamecock's big gaming event that hailed from Austin, Texas (if you didn't see some of our other coverage of the event, you really should.), I was told that our first game we would be looking at would be a free roaming game called Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars and it's DS counterpart, Mushroom Men: Rise of the Fungi. Approaching the setup for the game, I was reluctant to say the least. This looked to be nothing but another Nintendo Wii and DS game targeted towards kids. I was already anticipating receiving it in the mail between copies of Ben 10 and another Naruto game. But once the demo was fired up, I was pleasantly surprised to see a game that had more substance and wit than most games in its league.

Mushroom Men is not just one title that will be ported to multiple systems. In fact, the DS version is set to be more of a prequel to the Wii version. In both cases, the story is the same. An unearthly meteorite has landed on Earth, releasing some kind of mutating vapors. However, instead of working on the human level, the impact is much smaller. The vapors begin to affect plant life, insects, and small woodland creatures, making them sentient. Mushroom Men focuses on four separate tribes of mushrooms and their exploits in maintaining territory and relationships with the other tribes.

The single level of demo gameplay for the Wii version featured a walking, conniving mushroom wandering about a garden shed and fighting everything from spiders to gigantic, omnivorous rabbits thirsty for sweet, sweet mushroom blood. That is, assuming mutant mushrooms have blood. The garden shed level that we viewed showed that the game is not your typical punch-kick free roaming brawl game. Instead, the level design was interactive and featured elements of puzzle games within them. The shed level's best example of this was when dealing with the giant, evil mutated bunnies. Sure, one's first instinct would be to go up to them and start pounding on the “punch” button in hopes that the creature's energy would be depleted long before your own. Instead, though, a variety of creative and amusing “deaths” are laid out throughout the garden shed, making combat against the bunnies easier. For example, as one of the bunnies feasts on some green sludge, our spore hero can climb above and knock a working fan down, leading the bunny's demise, as a living plant looks on and shakes its head in horror and disgust.

The DS version of Mushroom Men is a two-dimensional side scroller that focuses more on environment interaction and the item combination system. Instead of your main character, players are given a choice between three different types: The Heavy, The Sage, and The Scout. Whichever you pick, each type will be suited best for specific activities. However, the game can be completed with either type. Your survival is based on how you grow your mushroom's abilities through leveling up. A stunning aspect of the DS version is the two-player co-operative, which not only allows for two types of mushrooms to complete each stage, but also subsequently adjusts the difficulty with the addition of a second player.

While everything was still in a preliminary polished stage, Mushroom Men's intuitive use of objects scattered across levels will help players to guide through the levels. Picking up tiny items such as pen caps and using them in conjunction with items like rubber bands and other seemingly meaningless, yet useful objects helps to strengthen weapons and make your character that much more dangerous. With a few kinks left to work out, Mushroom Men is already looking like it will be a surprising hit when it is released later in 2008.


Wii Trailer



DS Trailer