Hi, I'm a developer on Mushroom Men... NeoGAF finally approved my account, so now I can post
The videos you saw were at a very early stage in development (6 months) and frankly, all that we could show at the time were characters walking around, playing placeholder animations and environment art. Notice that you haven't seen much on Mushroom Men in a while... that's because all of our resources are focused on developing the game rather than posturing in publicity.
The game has come a long way since then. You'll see the latest at Gamecock's upcoming EIEIO event, and it will be drastically different from what you see in those trailers... namely, we actually have real gameplay mechanics in place, now.
I wanted to talk a bit about the combat system of Mushroom Men. So you explore the world and you pick things up and you make badass weapons out of these things, but then all of that would be meaningless if combat sucks. We could have gone two different routes... we could have taken the easy road and gone the RPG route with weapons where all you do is walk around and hit things until they die or we could have gone a more action-based route. We chose the latter... with full force! A lot of the design minds at Red Fly Studio are huge fans of fighting games and the beat-em-up genre. In addition to the regular tournament level hardcore Street Fighter/Soul Calibur/Tekken players on our team, we've also got fans of a plethora of games such as Devil May Cry, God of War, Street of Rage, Final Fight, the Punisher arcade game, Dungeons and Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara, Dynasty Warriors, Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm, and anything made by Treasure (my own personal heroes). The list for inspiration from various other great games out there goes on... Psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil, etc... Get it? Red Fly is not just a bunch of developers who don't play games. We're as hardcore as you are!
So anyway, this is the kind of studio that the combat system is coming from. We start with the games we like to play as our inspiration, but we don't stop there. Not all of the elements in combat from those games are applicable to Mushroom Men, and not all elements in those games are that much fun (but a lot are).
The combat will be less about crowd control and more about strategic choices against a few really tough enemies that will make you sweat with their advanced AI and strategy-rewarding combat mechanics. I can't go into too many details on that, but let's just say that I have not seen any game mix combat the way that we're doing it... both in presentation and mechanics.
We're aware that a lot of third party developers on the Wii (with the exception of Capcom, OMG!) tend to just phone it in when it comes to their Wii titles. They figure "just make waggle controls and people will eat that stuff up". The waggle issue is a specific problem that we've spent a lot of time coming up and testing solutions with.
We do not want Mushroom Men to be a game where you just walk next to an enemy and waggle it to death... and right now, it is not that kind of game.
There are other core systems in Mushroom Men's design that will also blow your mind, but I'm not sure how much I can say about it. I figure everybody knows a game like Mushroom Men will have combat in it, so I can talk about that, but combat is merely a subset of what Mushroom Men has to offer.
The team at Red Fly is basically a dream team composed of some of the best artists, designers, and programmers in the industry. We intend to make something special with the game that people will be talking about for years. This, along with Ghostbusters for the Wii (made by the other half of our studio), is our bread and butter that will either make or break us... Personally, I'm hoping for the former rather than the latter.
So I hope that clears up any misconceptions you might have about Mushroom Men. I'll be at GDC tomorrow, and then it's gonna be back to the grindstone for me.
Da muss ich doch spontan an das goettliche, unuebertroffene Deus Ex denken. 
