I rented Mushroom Men: Spore Wars for the Nintendo Wii for my five year old from blockbuster a few days ago on a whim. I had never heard of the game, my son just saw the box and wanted to check it out.
I am glad I did the game has a very simplistic play style similar to Super Mario Galaxy, and Ratatouille which are two excellent Wii games. This is a good thing as my five year old can play this game pretty well, only struggling with some of the jumps and camera angles at times.
The story is simple, a meteor hits earth and imbues fungi with sentience and humanoid appearance. They celebrate the day the great meteor came down and blessed them. You play a recently developed mushroom who is put through some trials at first (To teach you how to use the Wii controls).
The game has your typical A-jump, Z-block, point and use your sporekinesis with B (similar to shooting stars with the pointer in SMG). The game is really fun fighting bugs, moles and other critters as you make your way from the underground to the surface on a quest to absorb more meteorite pieces.
I like how your mushroom cap shows damage when you get hit, instead of a HP meter. I also like the fun little story line and collecting parts to assemble different weaponry. There are a surprisingly lot of weapons in the game.
Bottom line this is a great game for kids under 10 and fun for anyone who likes SMG or similar type games. I wish it had a more advanced 2 player mode like the Lego Indiana Jones or Batman series though. It allows a 2nd person to aim the controller and help out with sporekinesis and such just like SMG allowed the 2nd player to help Mario jump or shoot stars.
This game would get 3.5 out of 5 stars in my book.
-Dragon Blogger
