The Mims Beginning Review (Switch)

Review code used, with many thanks to Ultimate Games!

My My Mims, Mega Myth-Making!

So here I am, playing god again (Lethis review anyone?), and I think I have come to the conclusion that I would make a pretty good goddess.

I just want my little subjects to run around, be happy, and praise me like they should! They have to praise me!

I kid. Were I goddess-ing over a land of strange, but cute, alien beings I don’t think I would demand tribute… However in The Mims, they LIKE to give tribute and request your divine powers and presence. I’m not gonna yuck their yum, so bring on the praise and I will blast away your enemies and build you homes and bio-engineered chickens!

The story goes something like this: One day all the little Mims had to get onto their space ship and evacuate their planet.

They took an orb full of all the DNA they’d need – conveniently called the DNA Orb – in order to find a new planet and make that their new home.

While driving through the treacherous-ness that is outer-space, they ran into a meteor shower, AHH! Blam, bang, blort! Their ship is torn to shreds and most Mims are just floating around helplessly in stasis bubbles.

Some Mims managed to land on the little habitable (oh man, what a good phrase: little-habitable, say it three times fast!) islands, and now – through the strong power of Mim belief in YOU, their new goddess – you must help them build a home and a life on these islands. As well as helping to send out rescue shuttles every so often to rescue a sad-stasis-space-Mim.

Now you must build them up to the point that they can find their lost DNA Orb and do what they originally set out to do!

Whew! That was a lot, I hope you followed along neighbour. I think this is an alright story and premise for a god-sim game. It gets the job done of “this is why you’re here playing this game”, and it gave me enough motivation to help the little dudes out. Poor little Mims just want to make and find a new home, and were beset by botheration that was out of their control.

Who doesn’t want to help the underdog? They’re the ones we always cheer for in stories. The Mims: classic underdog tale.

Met’s Met Mown Moo Musiness!

So in typical god-sim-game fashion you’ve got your plethora of menus just ready and waiting to be clicked and sifted through basically circling your screen.

At the top you’ve got all of your stats: how much biomass you have accumulated, your gems, how many Mims you have, etc.

On the left side of the screen you’ve got all of the things you can eventually build: Mim houses, wind turbines for power, science buildings, biomass extractors, etc.

And on the right, you have your special god Psi-powers. These are the special powers that you can use to help out your Mims. You can heal them when they’re feeling sad (and they WILL feel sad, believe me, and when they’re sad they work and walk very slow); you can use a Psi-blast to zap pests off your island (extremely satisfying to watch a gross little worm just get blasted and then fly off into space); or you can use god-like fire powers TO BURNINATE THE LANDSCAPE!

Be careful with your burninate powers though, the Mims revere the land and environment; and while (I guess) they sometimes will forgive a necessary burning of a tree in the way, they will not be happy if you just start scorching every plant in the vicinity.

The game also keeps track of any shuttles you have sent out; for you can ship any livestock you create and grow to be sold for gems. As well, in the corner it shows you your Psi-power level.

Those of you familiar with god-sim games (like Civ or Lethis) will not be surprised to hear that most of the information you need will pop up as a big old block of text. From telling you how to use the controls, or what your goals for the level are, prepare to read.

There are also cute little cut scenes involving all of your little Mims and what their plans are. For example, in the second level one of your goals is to keep your officer alive; in the pre-level cutscene, we see the little dude being a little bossy leader and speaking his mind.

All Mimsy Were The Borogroves

Writing. Well, it serves the purpose it’s supposed to. Gets you into the story and lets you know what your goals are.

It’s not going to blow your literary-mind like “The Count of Monte Cristo” or Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, but it will get your from point A to point B.

I am not ashamed to admit that perhaps I am a bit of a literary snob, and I have very high standards in terms of writing in any medium (be it a book, TV show, movie, or video game); so I feel I must add that sometimes the writing threw me off.

NOW! Please take this critique with a grain of salt, but the times when the writing threw me off was when the Mims were having their little chats with each other. Perhaps the slightly strange and unanny writing (translation?) was intentional to give the Mims a unique vernacular and enhance their characters.

I am just saying that when the writing sounds and feels weird, it throws me off. I find myself reading a line, and then not having any clue what I just read, then I have to double back and re-read it again, and sometimes even a third time!

It’s the same issue I had with Petra in Fire Emblem: Three Houses: I know her character is supposed to be from some place that speaks another language, so all of her speech has these weird grammatical errors. It just throws me off and into the uncanny valley.

*SIDE BAR*
For those of you wondering what the uncanny valley is, here is a definition ripped straight off the google:

“The uncanny valley is a common unsettling feeling people experience when androids (humanoid robots) and audio/visual simulations closely resemble humans in many respects but are not quite convincingly realistic.”

*END SIDE BAR*

Management

So I booted up The Mims, played through the tutorial levels, and made my way into the first story mission. I’m playing it, it’s confusing me sometimes, but I start to get the hang of it.

I still don’t know how I feel about it, but I look at my watch and OH MAH GAWD, it’s already 10:34pm!? How did it get that late already?! I had been playing for two and a half hours, and they just blew by so fast I had no idea.

So that’s a good sign, for me anyway. The game did absorb me so fully and completely that I lost track of time.

Controls: so okay, here’s where the game gets niggly for me. Using the joy-cons or (in my case) pro-controller is all well and good.

I am sure we can all imagine a point-and-click style game, and when played with a controller it is a lot less smooth. You have to maneuver your cursor over things, and it especially makes placing buildings a bit of a chore as you keep trying to FEATHER-TOUCH and flick your building into that perfect spot you want to place it in.

Pro-controller is workable.

So there I was, playing on my TV thinking: “I can’t wait to try this with touch controls, it’ll probably be a lot faster and smoother”.

NOT! So if you take a look at the image below, that is where my cursor ended up when I put my finger directly in the middle of my Switch screen:

What’s it doing all the way over in the bottom left?! Silly little cursor, that’s not going to help me click and select anything! Literally while I was trying to get into the game with touch controls I was confused for a good five minutes because every time I touched “STORY” I was taken into the Options menu.

I’m not sure if that is a bug, or what is going on, but I found the touch screen controls entirely unplayable.

Little Niggles

I’m just going to list the little things that niggled me; some things I already mentioned above and went into more detail.

Load times were pretty long; almost every time I was worried my game had crashed.

Touch screen controls: super strange and made the game unplayable for me in that mode.

Bugs?: Seems like there were some really weird, and random, bugs in the game. For example, look at this screenshot. I wasn’t able to place my tower here because for some reason, this one random square (with nothing that I could see on it) was preventing me from placing my building. Makes me feel like the game was rushed.

Saving: I just had to pray it was saving because there’s no auto-save indicator that I could see, nor a “Save & Quit” option (only Quit).

Writing: Is it poorly translated, or do the Mims just speak weirdly?

Final Verdict

It absorbed my time and attention, and I found myself wanting to help the weird little Mims achieve their goal of a new home and saving their space-stasis-buddies.

The Mims themselves are cute and strange, and I liked that about them. They are all characters with bright, albeit strange-at-times personalities, but I can get behind it, and it made me want to help them and be a benevolent goddess.

It’s not going to break the bank by any means, so if you’re into god-sim games, and are jonesing for a new one you can play on the go, then picking up the Mims isn’t a bad idea.

Final Verdict: I like it

And this game did teach me one thing: it is not math that is the universal language, but food: