Men! Today is the day we take back our mushroom kingdom! Prepare yourselves! To arms!
Mushroom Wars is a challenging, fast-paced strategy game developed by Zillion Whales and Creat Studios. In the game, you are an aspiring general who is set on taken by his mushroom kingdom from his enemies, who look like him but have a different colour, so I assume they are brothers. Unfortunately, there is something more evil lurking in the shadows, ready to burn down every mushroom house in order to establish a reign of terror in the once happy fungus fields…
Although the paragraph above might seem a bit too far-fetched, it is exactly how I feel about this RTS game. It might not have a lot of story to it, and it might have a very cutesy art-style, but the combat is brutal, with endless waves of mushroom soldiers ready to die to protect the mushroom general. Onwards to victory, men! Spread those spores!
The combat system is fairly easy. You start off with one or more mushroom houses that have a numeric value added to them. This symbolizes the amount of soldiers you have stationed there. To capture other mushrooms, you have to send off your troops to that mushroom. If the amount of soldiers you send off is higher than the amount of soldiers in that mushroom, you capture it. Easy as… uhm… shiitake! To establish more control over the map, you can also upgrade your mushrooms, which increases their soldier generation capabilities. Later in the game, you can also capture towers, which shoot at the enemy, and upgrade those. After progressing further in the campaign, you can also convert your mushroom houses to towers or armouries, which adds even more options to your intricate strategies.
The game mechanics seem very simple, but the battles that I fought were often very brutal, bloody, and long. Playing Mushroom Wars forces you to think ahead, adapt to changing scenarios, and have multiple alternatives if your initial strategy does not work out. Luckily, you can play this game on easy-mode, which provided me with plenty of challenges, nail-biting, and tantrums. Either this game is very hard, even on easy difficulty, or I suck at it. Or I might be the worst strategist in mushroom history.
Once you are familiar with the game, you can try out your skills in the multiplayer mode, which can be pretty intense too! Sadly, not a lot of players were online at the moment of playing, since the update that enabled multiplayer had just been released at that moment. However, I am looking forward to online combat, and making my soldiers dominate the game map! The more likely scenario, obviously, is that I get my ass kicked.
| The Good: | The Bad: |
| + Fast-Paced RTS | – Brutally Punishing |
| + Simple Basic Game Mechanics | – No real story-mode |
| + Brutally punishing | – |
The game rewards you by giving you points for every battle won, and medals for your accomplishments: quickest expansion, successful defences, successful attacks, etc.. Other than that, there is not much more to it, but its strength lies in its simplicity. Mushroom Wars is punishing, addicting, and incredibly fun! Once you master the basics, the challenges become increasingly difficult, and the sense of accomplishment when you see the subsequent fireworks covering your screen after a successful scenario make you want to shout out a well-deserved “f*ck yeah!”.
Score 4 out of 5:
