Mushroom Men is, at its heart, a very cool little game that will probably get ridiculously overlooked in the holiday rush and post-holiday malaise. With an incredibly distinctive look and one of the best soundtracks of the year, the title is a fairly standard (but well-made) platformer with so much personality that you can’t help but want to love it. Whether you actually will do or not depends entirely on your ability to forgive a relatively archaic core structure.

A totally campy cut scene (done up in 1950s sci-fi style) opens the game and explains the back-story, in which a meteor crashed on Earth and gave rise to several tribes of sentient mushroom men. But the powers of the meteors made some of the 'shrooms go crazy – and the various tribes warred. You play as Pax, the last surviving member of the Bolete tribe, and you’ll adventure across the land, collecting meteor bits to power yourself up as you go. Levels are organized into “chapters”, each with a central mission and theme.

The world itself is actually incredibly cool – it’s a giant representation of the “real” world, from a tiny mushroom’s perspective. You’ll run around massive versions of bathrooms, gardens, barns, kitchens etc., while sentient plants, mushrooms, and crazed, “infected” animals add life to the place. Playing is incredibly reminiscent of Psychonauts and Conker’s Bad Fur Day, with the trippiness of the former and without the puerile humor of the latter.

Actually, the design is even closer to Conker, as you’re always completing a mission of some sort. You’ll kill X number of crazed animals, or find six specific doodads, or get rid of whatever boss character, and then you’ll rinse and repeat. It’s very basic and frankly, rather stale game design. It’s pretty surprising, considering how wacky and unorthodox the art style and the soundtrack are. It’s a shame to have such cool-looking levels stocked with lame (or at least, semi-lame) objectives.

Thankfully, the intuitive power-up system and pointer controls mix things up enough to redeem the straight-outta-‘98 level designs. The Wii Remote is used as a pointer at all times, and two key abilities are mapped to it – the sticky hand – which allows you to jump to far away places, and the telekinesis power, which allows you to manipulate objects that are “infected” with meteor goo. You’ll use both powers constantly, and the motion controls are, for once, incredibly useful.