Mushroom Wars : PS3
I still find buying games without boxes a bit of a negative experience. There’s no tangibility to it and, as someone who likes looking at a shelf with a long line of games on it, it feels as if you are not getting enough for your money - even if that money is only a fiver. Mushroom Wars is downloadable from the PS3 store and joins a growing list of such things; I can only hope that they don’t totally replace the physical media game, but I think such hoping is in vain.
Still, no box aside, what’s Mushroom Wars?
On the face of it, it’s a small and diverting little real time strategy game. There are few options; you merely send your armies in various amounts from one hut to another, and can change a basic man-making hut into a shooting tower or a power-enhancing forge. It’s that simple, but within such a small set of variables comes a very playable game. The armies very quickly become swarms and the charming and clean graphics means that you are amused watching these swarms march across the screen to do battle.
There is a campaign mode with a bunch of levels and various side modes to do once this is done. It also provides a multiplayer mode which is well worthwhile as long as you can find someone of a similar skill level to you to play with (which isn’t so easy considering this isn’t exactly the best known game of the era). The campaign mode then is where you spend the most time, charging hundreds of little orange mushroom men across the screen, taking over huts and towers in an attempt for total domination. The first couple of levels are predictably easy but then the game gets going and starts to punish you for slow thinking.
Mushroom Wars is fairly fast, quick to play and get into and incredibly rewarding when you beat a hard level (and there are definitely a couple of those). My one problem was it was that I couldn’t beat the last level for a long time. In fact, it wasn’t until a friend suggested a totally different strategy that I was willing to go back and give the final level a go, and what do you know - his strategy worked! Thanks Tom! Finishing that final level in a mammoth fifteen minute game (games are usually closer to five than fifteen minutes) reminded me how much I enjoyed every level before it. Mushroom Wars, like many games, is so much better when you are winning and not chucking the controller across the room!
It’s got the come-back-and-play-me-more factor too, not just for the multiplayer mode, but for the challenge of doing it on hard. Neatly, you can pick the difficulty of each level as you enter it, so it’s easy to jump in, play a level on hard and jump out and back into reality again. Well, it would be easy if it wasn’t addictive as hell. Which it is.
All in all, Mushroom Wars is well worth the time it takes you to download. I’d love some DLC (namely a new campaign), and I’d love a few people to play with (it’ll support four, I think - must buy more PS3 controllers) because I think it’ll come into its own as a four person party game. If you like real time strategy games, this is well worth a look. Perhaps it doesn’t have the depth of the major names, but it’ll test you, especially on hard.
