Mushroom Wars 2 review for Nintendo Switch

Platform: Nintendo Switch
Also On: PC
Publisher: Zillion Whales
Developer: Zillion Whales
Medium: Digital
Players: 1-4
Online: Yes
ESRB: E

I’ll say this for Mushroom Wars 2: there’s certainly a lot of it. I mean, I wouldn’t say that I particularly enjoy it, and I think that somewhere around the 70th or 80th mission (out of 100 in total) it started feeling like real-time strategy overkill, but I don’t think there’s any question that if you want real-time strategy on your Switch, Mushroom Wars 2 almost certainly offers more of that than any of its competition.

I should immediately clarify, of course, that just because I don’t like it, it’s not inconceivable that anyone else could. It has some charms. The graphics, particularly in the cutscenes, are fairly cute, as you might expect from a game where sentient mushrooms are doing battle over toadstool-looking habitations. In fact, given that you’re mainly fighting over terrains that remain largely unchanged apart from the positioning of those toadstools, you could even say that the graphics are much better than they need to be — but I’m not going to complain.

Further, the controls are fairly easy to master. Even if you’re not that familiar with RTS games, Mushroom Wars 2 borrows enough from tower defense that it should seem pretty straightforward. It also doesn’t hurt that, especially early on, the game doesn’t skimp on tutorial levels.

Unfortunately, as I said up top, Mushroom Wars 2’s big drawback is that it also doesn’t skimp on content. That may sound like a bizarre thing to complain about, but there’s really not a lot of variety from level to level. On top of that, this game demands that players be patient, since you have to spend a lot of time waiting for those toadstools to generate enough mushroom army men for you to launch assaults on the opposing — which means that you also spend a lot of time looking at those maps that, again, don’t look all that different from each other.

Of course, if you’re an RTS diehard, that may just be the appeal of the game. If that is, then you’ll probably want to investigate this game, because there’s ample amounts of both strategizing and waiting. If, however, you want something that moves a little faster than paint drying, you’ll want to look elsewhere, because you’re not going to find it in Mushroom Wars 2.

Zillion Whales provided us with a Mushroom Wars 2 code for review purposes.

Grade: C