Review: Mushroom Wars (PS3)
Have you ever thought it would be a good idea to mix an RTS with an arcade game? You're in luck: Creat Studios has heard your call and delivers the game Mushroom Wars. In it, armies of tiny Europeans, Chinese, and cat-like aliens vie for dominance over a magical mushroom kingdom. At least, that is what it looked like to me.
It uses a variant of RTS gameplay that I've seen a couple examples of now--the PC game Eufloria and the iPhone game Galcon. There are settlements distributed throughout the map. Your goal is to move your armies from settlement to settlement to conquer the map. Once you have conquered a settlement, it will automatically spawn units over time that you direct to conquer new settlements. Winning usually means producing more units faster to overwhelm your foe. All units are the same, but there are three kinds of settlements: "villages" that spawn troops, "turrets" that fire at enemy troops on the move, and "blacksmith shops" that upgrade your army. You can spend troops to upgrade the villages or turrets, or change from one settlement type to another.
Armies will almost always be in motion with rare pauses of no more than 30 seconds to respawn lost troops. Games are somewhere on the order of 5 minutes, sometimes 10 with the larger maps. There are nearly 30 campaign maps, and a dozen skirmish maps. Campaign maps you can unlock quickly on easy difficulty, which mostly is easy, though sometimes is medium or even hard--and then normal and hard settings offer more challenge from there.
2D Graphics are reminiscent of Fat Princess, even simpler, but a similar visual style. Likewise, vocalizations are angsty chips. The sounds of combat fit in well, and the music is an easy jazz that settles nicely into the background. After a good game, it is easy to watch your replay, or upload it to YouTube. There is no story to the campaign, just a series of maps. I wouldn't have expected animated cut scenes, but a little text or still-frame story to give shape to the Mushroom Wars world would have been nice. There is local multiplayer (which I haven't tried but sounds fun) but nothing over the Internet other than scoreboards.
RTS's have a longstanding antagonism with consoles around the controls, and while Mushroom Wars is pretty good it doesn't completely get things right. You select freindly settlements with the left stick, which is crisp and good. But then you direct movement with R1 + left stick, which is too sluggish, and in the midst of a fast battle, too often the movement arrow shifts to the wrong settlement. If we had an enemy selection cursor that moved like the friendly one, that would be ideal. It would also be nice if we could remap keys.
Bottom Line: mixing RTS elements with arcade action works better than I would have guessed. Though simple and basic it is a well-crafted game. With several AAA titles on my coffee table, it is Mushroom Wars that I've been loading up first, and then not stopping until it is time for bed. I'll easily spend an hour or two on a map trying out different strategies and upping my score or cutting my time.
Recommendation: if mixing RTS elements in with an arcade game sounds appealing or a least curious, the demo is worth a download. The difficulty ramps up rather quickly after that. At $10 on PSN, the price is right.
Have you ever thought it would be a good idea to mix an RTS with an arcade game? You're in luck: Creat Studios has heard your call and delivers the game Mushroom Wars. In it, armies of tiny Europeans, Chinese, and cat-like aliens vie for dominance over a magical mushroom kingdom. At least, that is what it looked like to me.
It uses a variant of RTS gameplay that I've seen a couple examples of now--the PC game Eufloria and the iPhone game Galcon. There are settlements distributed throughout the map. Your goal is to move your armies from settlement to settlement to conquer the map. Once you have conquered a settlement, it will automatically spawn units over time that you direct to conquer new settlements. Winning usually means producing more units faster to overwhelm your foe. All units are the same, but there are three kinds of settlements: "villages" that spawn troops, "turrets" that fire at enemy troops on the move, and "blacksmith shops" that upgrade your army. You can spend troops to upgrade the villages or turrets, or change from one settlement type to another.
Armies will almost always be in motion with rare pauses of no more than 30 seconds to respawn lost troops. Games are somewhere on the order of 5 minutes, sometimes 10 with the larger maps. There are nearly 30 campaign maps, and a dozen skirmish maps. Campaign maps you can unlock quickly on easy difficulty, which mostly is easy, though sometimes is medium or even hard--and then normal and hard settings offer more challenge from there.
2D Graphics are reminiscent of Fat Princess, even simpler, but a similar visual style. Likewise, vocalizations are angsty chips. The sounds of combat fit in well, and the music is an easy jazz that settles nicely into the background. After a good game, it is easy to watch your replay, or upload it to YouTube. There is no story to the campaign, just a series of maps. I wouldn't have expected animated cut scenes, but a little text or still-frame story to give shape to the Mushroom Wars world would have been nice. There is local multiplayer (which I haven't tried but sounds fun) but nothing over the Internet other than scoreboards.
RTS's have a longstanding antagonism with consoles around the controls, and while Mushroom Wars is pretty good it doesn't completely get things right. You select freindly settlements with the left stick, which is crisp and good. But then you direct movement with R1 + left stick, which is too sluggish, and in the midst of a fast battle, too often the movement arrow shifts to the wrong settlement. If we had an enemy selection cursor that moved like the friendly one, that would be ideal. It would also be nice if we could remap keys.
Bottom Line: mixing RTS elements with arcade action works better than I would have guessed. Though simple and basic it is a well-crafted game. With several AAA titles on my coffee table, it is Mushroom Wars that I've been loading up first, and then not stopping until it is time for bed. I'll easily spend an hour or two on a map trying out different strategies and upping my score or cutting my time.
Recommendation: if mixing RTS elements in with an arcade game sounds appealing or a least curious, the demo is worth a download. The difficulty ramps up rather quickly after that. At $10 on PSN, the price is right.