In space, nobody hears it teem… So goes the tagline to Mush, a free-to-play browser-based MMO from French developer Twinoid. The game takes place in a bleak future where Earth has been overrun by the Mush, and a lone spaceship, the Daedalus, roams the stars, searching for safety for the ship’s crew and “humanity’s last hope”. But not all is well on the Daedalus; the ship’s running low on food, oxygen and fuel. Even worse, it’s discovered that the Mush are also onboard. Now the crew must band together to defend their ship, stabilize resources and root out the Mush invasion.
We are so screwed!
The concept behind Mush is that each player plays one of the 16 crew members aboard the Daedalus, each with a unique set of skills and abilities, and by using those abilities to accomplish tasks and help each other out, you can maintain the ship, gather resources and survive. The catch is that at the beginning of the game two members of the crew are randomly selected as Mush, the malevolent alien race of infectious spores. The goal for these two players is to work in secret to sabotage the ship and infect or kill other crew members. So what you have is a team trying to work together to save their ship, while two saboteurs work to bring it down from the inside. The concept is an intriguing extrapolation of the traitor mechanic popular in boardgames, so it’s really disappointing when this game doesn’t live up to its potential.
The problems with Mush become apparent almost immediately and begin with the game’s very loose tutorial, which will have you run through a few of the actions which you can perform in game, like cooking food, repairing broken doors and gunning down enemy starships. However, once the actual game begins you will realize that there are still dozens and dozens of other tasks you can perform, and you have no idea how to do them or what purpose they serve. You can research projects at the Nexus, but what does that do? And what’s the Nexus? Or you could hop into one of Daedalus’ starfighters… Maybe? So the game presents you with a daunting wealth of options, but that’s fine because you’ll certainly want to explore all of them and find out what they do. Except that you can’t do that either. And there’s the game’s biggest issue…
I hold great and terrible power in the palm of my hands.
Mush plays in cycles. Every cycle each player is given a finite amount of Action Points (AP) and Movement Points (MP). Moving from room to room costs one MP, while performing actions like researching a project or taking a shower will have different AP costs. If you don’t have these points you can’t do anything in the game, and each cycle only refreshes one of each point (Although modifiers can raise or lower this amount). Here’s the thing… Each cycles lasts three hours. What this means is that at any given cycle you have an incredibly limited amount of points to accomplish tasks. Now, limiting how much you can do at any given time period is a pretty normal F2P mechanic; it ensures a relatively even playing field for all the players, including those who can’t be at their computer for long periods of time like with a traditional MMO. But in Mush’s case, the game’s point system only gives you a few minutes of gameplay every three hours, and while you can learn to effectively use that time, I imagine most players will have a first experience like mine: The game begins and, looking at the map of the ship, I see many interesting rooms to explore. Eager to start my adventure I begin checking out each room, or at least I try to until I enter room two and I’m out of points. My adventure is over for this cycle. Honestly, I can only imagine how many players started this game, receiving almost no explanation about what to do, spent three minutes looking around until they could no longer continue, and seeing they would have to wait three hours before they could try again, quit and never came back to the game.
When you have points to spend the game works well enough, and can even be enjoyable. Each crew member has a different set of skills which makes them especially good at certain tasks like raising crops or building ship advancements, and classes are varied well enough that most characters seem unique enough to change your play style for each one. Indeed, after patiently waiting through three days of cycles, I feel like I know what I’m doing well enough to make a valuable contribution to the ship’s well being. The big issue here is that there’s almost no way to figure out what to do or how to best use your skills without relying on some other, more experienced player to tell you. I was lucky enough to begin my first game on a ship full of friendly and helpful players and was able to learn a lot about how to use my class. My next game took me to ship full of petulant children who were more interested in name calling and antagonizing each other, which left me mostly to my own devices. I didn’t get much done. So while the game isn’t difficult to learn, without some sort of guidance it’s near impossible with the AP and MP limits. The forum, while small is growing in the amount of advice it provides and there is apparently a Wiki in the process of being translated from French, but for the time being you’re mostly going to rely on the kindness of strangers.
Waiting to do… Whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing.
It should be noted that while the game is free-to-play, it does offer a premium account for a monthly fee of 9.99€ (About $14 USD), which allows you to add additional skills to your character as they level up. Again, it’s really hard to say what the value of these skills are without having them, but my initial impression is that the game can be played without ever paying for the premium account.
What’s unfortunate about Mush is that it feels like it has a really cool game trapped inside its bad F2P structure. It looks really good with its colorful sprites and backgrounds, and when you are actually able to accomplish goals it can be really satisfying to feel like you’re helping the whole team. But between the lack of instruction and the sheer amount of time it takes to even get started with this game I can’t imagine that many people would even come back for their second cycle, let alone a whole game. I think there’s a fun game somewhere inside of Mush, but aside from the most patient of gamers, nobody is going to find it.
