Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars
Score: 60% ESRB: Everyone 10+ Publisher: Southpeak Interactive Developer: Red Fly Studio Media: CD/1 Players: 1 Genre: Platformer/ Platformer (3D)/ Action
Graphics & Sound: Maybe it's just a function of playing lots and lots of games, or maybe I'm getting soft in my old age. I actually feel a twinge of sympathy for games that set out to be something special and end up mediocre. It's those subtle cues that things weren't just slapped together, but were built with some intention. Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars is every inch a beautiful disaster, a license with absolutely no future on a platform that doesn't even do it justice. There's a hard-boiled, '50s era look to the game that connects more to aliens than gumshoes. Visions of bad B-movies are hovering around the edge of this thing, mostly evident in the typography and other design touches. The graphics are nice, but nothing to write home about in comparison to many other recent Wii titles. The camera suffers and lurches through the same 3D minefield as many others have in the past, making it difficult to get your bearings, line up jumps, and generally find your way around in the world. The game environments are nicely thought out, but are incredibly painful to navigate due to poor controls and execution. To shed a more positive light on Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars, we have only to look at the extra items contained in the Gallery, accessible but strangely hidden in the Options menu... There's a jukebox that opens immediately with all the game's music. There are an impressive number of tracks in the soundtrack, but it's the quality more than then quantity that you'll appreciate. Les Claypool, of Primus and other more recent ensembles, lends his talents to crafting a bunch of original songs for The Spore Wars. Finding this stockpile of awesome music is a treat, and there is a collection of concept art and unlockables you can scan while you enjoy the music. Leaving the Gallery shuts off the music, but you'll enjoy it all the more playing through the game. The shame is that few players will stick with The Spore Wars long enough to appreciate its great music.
Gameplay: Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars holds relatively few surprises. Envision any 3D Platformer you've played and you can be sure that The Spore Wars contains every trick in the book. Instead of this making things feel progressive or satisfying, it makes most gamers put up a wall immediately and start the mental wheels rolling. How does The Spore Wars stack up against others out there? It is incredibly unfocused and at the same time, completely linear. Missions and levels play out while you gather items, defeat enemies, and navigate through a dangerous world in which you are not much more than a speck. Battling enemies is either a snooze or an impossibility, but won't tax your intellect or your twitch reflexes as much as your button-mashing skill. Bosses tend to require more strategy, but are just bigger versions of the stupid enemies you'll face throughout the game. The theme of collecting items is given more purpose by allowing players to customize their own weapons and build new versions as they explore. Exploration and discovery is rewarded in this fashion, but the more advanced weapons aren't worth much since they can't be shown off online or traded with friends. The greatest entertainment available in The Spore Wars is really the first hour, as you learn the skills and abilities of your alien mushroom protagonist. There are some mini-games bundled with the music jukebox and concept art viewer. These games are actually way more fun than the campaign, and since there is no online play or multiplayer available, they are the only way you'll have to enjoy yourself beyond the solo campaign. The problem as you get deeper into The Spore Wars is that frustrating controls and poor level design become the focus rather than the game's story or character development. Beating up on bad guys works about as well with Weapon A as Weapon B, so the incentive to gather parts and construct your own items falls flat. The puzzles contained in each stage are rarely more involved than finding something to hit or push or combine with something else to clear the way to the next stage or defeat a boss.
Difficulty: Extremely frustrating issues with level design make Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars almost unplayable at times. A perfect example is a section of one of the early stages, "Dial M for Morel," where you enter a room that looks like the inside of a car's engine. The pistons rise and fall to create platforms you can use to climb and access the next section of the level. Problem is, at least once while we played through, a piston just decided not to keep moving, making it impossible to keep going. Fumbling around this room enough times made us ready to throw our controller and the entire Wii through a window, but on a reload and replay, we entered the room and cleared it while the piston was still moving. Other strange design choices include small platforms that are difficult to hit on a jump with the bad camera. There is a camera that you can control, making all angles on the level available at any time from the perspective of your character. As much as we've hated some so-called intelligent cameras in games, The Spore Wars would have been much improved with some type of A.I. camera, even a dumb A.I. camera. Having to move the camera around to set up jumps makes moving around unnaturally hard, and takes away from any connection or suspension of disbelief. Combat with some enemies will result in a quick death and respawn unless you master blocking and the special powers available to your character. Throwing objects is especially useful when enemies are visible at a distance, but they will often pop up from hiding in various parts of the level, making for brief excitement that turns quickly to frustration due to poor controls.
Game Mechanics: Motion controls are thankfully limited to attacking in the game, and there aren't that many things to do other than attack or use a grappling hook feature that acts like a zip-line when used selectively. Another feature that only works in a specific context is the spore power, Sporekinesis, letting your character pull objects in to him and blast them back out at enemies. This is a lot like using The Force, and the other game that used this style of attack extensively was Half Life 2 with its Gravity Gun. Sporekinesis isn't as nice as that, but allows you to grab certain objects in the game and move them out of your way. You can also throw these objects and use them as offensive weapons against large groups of enemies or a single, large enemy. As the cursor passes across any area where you can use your power, you'll feel a bit of rumble in the Wii-mote letting you know. There were opportunities to use special powers in Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars for puzzles or to increase the level of interaction with objects and characters in the game. Instead of building this feature out, The Spore Wars falls back on tired convention. The idea of custom weapons has been done and done again, with my vote for the high point in this genre being Ratchet and Clank... Basic movement and battle control is functional, but that's the bare minimum required in this style of game. What's missing is the kind of tight control or innovative game mechanics that would bring Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars above the crowd. Faced with mediocrity or abject failure, The Spore Wars manages to land in the first camp, but always skirts the borders of the second. Players looking for anything novel will be greatly disappointed. Players looking for a fun Platformer will also be disappointed. Playing with a friend is out of the question, and there's nothing in the way of online content or leaderboards. About the most fun we had with the game was looking at concept art, playing mini-games, and listening to the great original music featuring Les Claypool. Preferring this to the actual campaign says a lot for how low the fun factor is for this outing. Yes, this spore is a straight bore...
-Fridtjof, GameVortex Communications AKA Matt Paddock
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