GENRE
	Action Adventure
	DEVELOPER
	Red Fly Studios
	PUBLISHER
	Gamecock Media
	LOCAL WIRELESS MULTI-PLAY
	Yes
	Wi-Fi/GLOBAL ONLINE MULTI-PLAY
	No
	MICROPHONE
	No
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Mushroom Men is a new IP from developer Red Fly Studios (also at work for the upcoming Ghostbusters for Wii) and publisher Gamecock Media (known for their occasionally controversial moments). The franchise hit both DS and Wii this past month, and while the Wii version is a solid action adventure game, the DS version is senselessly aggravating.

visuals

While not up to the technical standards of its Wii counterpart, Rise of the Fungi certainly looks interesting. With a plot that revolves around mutated fungi and bugs, the game parades out an assortment of beetle warriors, fungi sages, and mosquito dive bombers, among many others. The art style is charming, made all the more interesting by a micro-sized environment full of huge thimbles and massive batteries. It’s a novel world from which to operate.

audio

According to pre-release reports, Primus musician Les Claypool was slated to pen the soundtrack for the Mushroom Men games. True to form, the game boasts an eclectic, guitar-driven soundtrack. It’s not all quite conventional, but it works nicely and gives the game a decidedly different flavor than other games. Don’t expect much beyond that, though, as the sound effects are pretty pedestrian and there is no voicework.

gameplay

Rise of the Fungi is a side-scrolling action-platformer with light RPG elements. Players move to and fro along large levels solving quest objectives, fighting enemies, and collecting items and equipment. At the outset, players chose a character among three archetypes: a melee fighter, a mage-style character, or a nimble scout. The plotline chronicles the saga of fungi characters born from some sort of cosmic phenomenon. The whole package isn’t terribly long and should be finished in six to eight hours -- assuming a player actually possesses the fortitude to see the game through to the end.

The game tries to make use of the touch screen for everything, and in the process suffers from trying to do too much. Rather than confine action to one screen and menus to another, the game allows for the player to voluntarily swap them between the top and bottom screens. This is a little disorienting at first and not always intuitive, but it gets a little easier to follow after a few hours. When the action screen is assigned to touch, players can tap on specific objects or draw shapes to trigger special spore attacks. When the menu screen is assigned to touch, players can navigate maps, menus, and perform character and item upgrades.

There are a few conventions in the game that certainly offer potential. Characters pick up “mutagens” in the field that can be used to upgrade a few choice stats and abilities. Likewise, players acquire all sorts of items, from nails to gasoline, that can be combined to create different, stronger weapons. The item-building mechanic is especially interesting, as it encourages some experimentation in creating useful melee and ranged weapons. It’s also worth noting that different weapons have different characteristics (cold, fire, etc.) that do different amounts of damage to different enemies, so keeping a varied arsenal is essential to success in combat.

Platforming is also a major component of the game, but it’s absolutely terrible. Characters can’t jump very far and it’s sometimes hard to see platforms in the dark environments, so falling is common. The rub is that characters take damage for falling too far; sometimes even seemingly harmless drops of a screen's length or so can dish out significant health damage. Although falling damage (unlike enemy damage) will regenerate over time, it’s quite easy to fall so far that the player is killed altogether. Death-by-fall happens often in Rise of the Fungi; a player could easily get killed 30 times from such deaths in the first few hours. Because deaths send players back to the most recent save point -- and because the game does not automatically save at the start of a new level -- players are liable to end up retracing the same paths over and over again and wasting a lot of time in the process. It’s a head-scratching design decision that sucks the fun completely out of the game.

multiplayer

The game allows for cooperative multiplayer via local wireless multi-card play. We were unable to playtest this mode and it is doubtful most players will know someone else who owns the game that they can play with.

overall

Mushroom Men: Rise of the Fungi is a tragedy of colossal proportions. The game has nearly all the elements of a sleeper hit: interesting premise, compelling art design, eclectic sound, an interesting weapon creation system, and some unique gameplay mechanics. Unfortunately, all of that is drowned out by a few critical design mistakes, chief among them being a broken platforming system that leads to far too many senseless deaths. This one design decision robs the game of any fun factor it might otherwise have held, and for that reason cannot be recommended for purchase. It’s a lost opportunity for a budding IP.

5.0/10