And such is the classically overblown B-film narrative of Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars for Nintendo Wii. It’s deliriously bonkers, and we love it.
The Spore Wars is an adventure platforming title from Red Fly Studio set to be released in November this year, and takes place after its DS counterpart, Mushroom Men: Rise of the Fungi. We had a chance to go hands-on with the game at THQ’s offices in Melbourne recently, and came away decidedly intrigued.
It’s a hard ask, choosing the Wii as your platform for platforming. With Super Mario Galaxy being one of the best in the genre gaming has ever seen, it’s surely fresh in the average Wii owner’s mind. How do you overcome that hurdle?
At last, we come to a fork in the road.
The answer, according to The Spore Wars, is to drown out those Mario memories with sheer style. The most important point about The Spore Wars is that it genuinely feels like a throwback to those pioneering Mario days of videogaming, where the colour palette was roughly the same as the amount of employees working on the game. It feels like Mushroom Men, with its 50's Sci-Fi aesthetic and barmy premise, could have come out of the same era where it was okay to have an Italian plumber take on an overgrown ape without your investors and corporate board going into shock at the game’s initial pitch. It’s a creative idea that only this medium is capable of. Why not play as a walking, combat-ready mushroom, hell-bent on taking down evil looking rabbits?
But that’s not to say that a creative idea is all that Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars has going for it. The level design, tapping into those small-scaled fantasies we all had as children, is cleverly familiar yet surprisingly foreign: ever fancied eliminating an evil-looking bunny by using everyday household goods to your advantage? There’s a sense of freedom to the gameplay in The Spore Wars, as the player may grapple onto certain surfaces and float - using, of course, the cap of the mushroom - at any time.
Then there are the Spore powers. These act in a reasonably similar way to force powers, and can be used to pick up and levitate objects using the Wii remote, or to trigger traps for enemies. The controls, on the whole, work quite well, and the weapons, like the levels, are cleverly familiar. One of the first weapons encountered by players, for example, incorporates a DS stylus.
The rat's attempt to install underbody neon lights for lapping went horribly wrong.
Red Fly Studio has also obviously not been content to simply graft their unique theme onto a traditional interface. The objective menu in the level we played, for instance, was a picture of the nine rabbits we had to take out through the level. As each rabbit went to that great bunny hutch in the sky, their counterpart in the picture would be blanked out. Similar thought has gone into the HUD - or rather, the lack of a HUD. Health, for instance, is displayed simply by how much head your mushroom has left. If he’s suffered a few dangerous hits, for example, he’ll be missing large chunks of his cap; at perfect health, he’ll be fully formed.
Audio is another point of interest for the game, as Red Fly have chosen to go with innovative bass player Les Claypool, of Primus fame, for the soundtrack. The music will be partially generated as the player proceeds, with promises of musical transformation as puzzles are completed.
The Spore Wars presents an interesting equation for Wii owners and platforming fans. It’s unusual to see a new property in the genre these days; more often that not, new entries are either Mario sequels or film tie-ins. It’s also a game that’s probably not aimed at the younger crowd - THQ told us they’ll be looking at the teenage audience with Spore Wars, and it’s easy to see why. The game’s humour and low level scary moments indicate that a more clued-in crowd were in mind when Red Fly were designing the game, which make it perhaps that little bit more worth watching up until release. The Spore Wars is nothing if not unique, and we think that Red Fly might be on to something with the game.
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