Wrath of the Fungi

Summary

"Press menu, puny earthling"—this is the friendly greeting three armed mushrooms have in store for you when you start playing Wrath of the Fungi. It’s a sort of a board game in which heavily packing mushrooms move across the field, butchering each other. The goal of the game is to eliminate as many mushrooms as possible.

Read on to find out if the game managed to suck me in, or whether I suddenly developed a mushroom phobia!

This test review was written by our community member Max L.
 

It’s easy to get the hang of both the game and the gameplay: every player (there can’t be more than four) starts in one corner of the 5x5 field. To navigate his mushrooms, each player has two options: he can hop two fields or else simply move to the closest field—if he opts for the latter, he will receive the added bonus of the mushroom being cloned.

If it’s Player A’s turn and he moves his mushroom near an enemy mushroom, the enemy mushrooms will explode and new Player A mushrooms will pop up instead.

As I mentioned, up to four players can battle it out, and there’s also the option of playing against and artificial intelligence (AI) or other puny earthlings from the same smartphone.

AI has four levels: Easy, Intermediate, Advanced and Expert.

There’s also the option of forming teams, so that, e.g. two teams of two people play against each other.

I have to admit the whacky greeting made me chuckle, and after playing a few rounds of Wrath of the Fungi I started to get into the game, as you get the hang of the gameplay quite quickly and thus can get going fairly rapidly. However, I did notice that you can basically wipe out your opponent with just a few moves, irrelevant of which level you chose to play. So if you’re looking to play a longer match this might prove to be a bit annoying. That being said, as soon as there are more mushrooms on the playing field it does take longer to beat the opponent, and so it does get to be more challenging.
 

The graphics are kept pretty simple, which doesn’t affect the enjoyment of the game. Controls are easy and intuitive and are done via touchstone. There’s no sound.

Once you’ve pressed Menu you will see the following options displayed:

• New Game
• Instructions
• About
• Exit
• Other Games

New Game is pretty self explanatory. Instructions are there to let puny earthlings know how the game is played. About gives a few details about the artist and developer, as well as few words of thanks. Other Games links to apps designed by the same developer (the same guy is the creator of The Splatting).

I did notice that the Android status bar doesn’t fade out during a game, and when you go back to the homescreen via the Home button you can’t get back to the game afterwards, even when you press down on Home for a while.

As mentioned, controls are via touchscreen. Move the mushrooms by pressing on a mushroom and sliding your finger to where you want it to go.
Scores are shown at the bottom of the playing field; they refer to the number of living mushrooms per player.

Bottom line:

Wrath of the Fungi lacks the necessary depth to keep a player hooked for hours on end, but I did enjoy playing it while I was testing it out, and can imagine that if you’re waiting around somewhere this might be an ideal app to kill some time. Also, it didn’t provoke a mushroom phobia in me, for which I’m grateful.
 

I didn’t experience any problems with Wrath of the Fungi on my Samsung i5700.

THe app can be dowloaded free of cost from the Android Market.