GOL Cast: Fending Off Pests and Collecting Biomass in The Mims Beginning

This game popped up on Steam a while back and immediately caught my attention with it's interesting looking visual style and store page description. Let's see how good it actually is!

The Mims Beginning is a RTS god game of sorts in which you must take care of your minions, the Mims, and take them on a journey through the galaxy. You'll have to manage defend them from dangerous creatures, manage your economy carefully and plant vegetation to allow your little village to prosper.

Note: this video was recorded before my Nouveau experiment on the Nvidia blob. Yes, I've been that lazy to write this review.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MNgaPbgqRs

At first the game sort of reminded me of Spore with its cutesy creatures and colourful visual style. But it turns out at the end of the day it doesn't have a whole lot in common with Spore.

In The Mims Beginning you take the role of a god and you travel from floating island to another and help the Mims with a variety of problems. Currently the game only has a singleplayer campaign in which you will be given a unique set of objectives to complete on each level. These range from gathering enough resources and recruiting enough Mims to destroying dangerous plants or enemies.

To do this you must naturally manage your economy, as often is the case with strategy games. You have two major resources: biomass and gems. Biomass is gathered by collecting various kinds of fruit and thrown into an extractor. So you'll have to find a spot with plants or plant your own fruit plants and build an extractor there. Your Mims will handle the rest. It's worth noting that plants in The Mims Beginning are not quite like plants in real life. Instead of just dropping fruit they literally throw the fruit, often quite far away, so you either need to build buildings to block the flying fruit or build your extractor around where they usually land.

Gems on the other hand are a bit trickier to get. Currently you only have one way to gain gems which is trading. You can breed various animals and if you feed them with fruit they will grow into their full size and can then be shipped off using a space port to get a couple of gems per each animal. Gems are also very valuable and doing basically anything will require some gems. Want to construct a building? You need gems. Need additional Mims to handle biomass collection? Hand over the gems please. It's also very easy to screw up with your economy by not thinking about gem production early enough. I've had to restart a level couple of times because I ran out of gems and had no efficient way of gaining more. When you are breeding animals you also need to make sure you have the type of fruit available that that type of animal eats. Some animals are picky about their diet and will only eat black or yellow fruits, while others can eat all kinds of fruit.

That's the biggest part of the economy explained but there is more. You will also need electricity to power some buildings, such as the biolab which will produce animals for you to trade and the PSI Tower which allows you to use your divine powers. I'll come back to that a bit later. You have a couple of ways to produce energy. You can either build a generator, which will burn biomass to produce huge amounts of energy, or build wind turbines around the edges and on the higher parts of your little floating island to harness the winds to power your houses.

There is also one interesting thing to mention in addition to the economy, which is the “Smell” system. When your island starts to have more Mims, more animals and more fruit laying around, your island starts to smell. And that's not a good thing. The smell of fruit will attract pests and the smell of animals will draw in various predators. Pests are pretty harmless, they just run around your island and eat all the fruit they can find. But predators are usually very dangerous. In addition to hunting the pests on your island they will very likely want to eat a couple of your Mims too. So keeping the fruit and animal smell levels as low as possible is also one of your secondary objectives. By making sure there aren't any fruit laying around and having your guardian Mims kill all the pests you can avoid the pests and the predators for the most part.

I mentioned that this was a god game. Well, there are some divine PSI powers at your disposal, however, they are more or less just supportive abilities. One of your most useful powers is your Replenish power which you use to replenish your Mims energy and health. Naturally your Mims can get hurt in combat but they will also eventually become tired of working, so you'll either want to give them an energy boost or build a house for them to rest in. Other powers include the Psionic Explosion that will hurt enemies and throw them around and the Snail Gait which slows down enemies. There aren't a whole lot of divine powers at your disposal and the game doesn't really seem to focus around them. They are certainly very useful but they don't really make me feel like a god. In fact I nearly forgot about the fact that I'm supposed to be a divine figure after around 40 minutes.

As I already mentioned, one of the things that draw me to play this game was the visual style of the game. It's very colourful and bright and these things seem to appeal to me a lot. I guess the dark winters of Finland might have something to do with it. In any case, the game looks very beautiful and the texture quality and the models are detailed enough to look good even at a very close distance. It doesn't have the most detailed textures I've ever seen, but come on, this is a strategy game.

It also performs very nicely for a Unity3D game. It does sometimes drop to 30-40 fps region but most of the time it will run at around 50-60 fps, even on Nouveau.

Even if this game isn't necessarily really a god game it's still a very enjoyable, very management oriented RTS. I've played it for around 6 hours and I've played around half of the levels available at the moment. The game is still in Early Access but it's a very complete Early Access game, meaning that it's not just a short bugfest. I haven't actually seen a single bug yet, so that's good. The developers are planning to tweak the game and the full version should have a 20 missions long campaign (currently 12 levels have been implemented) along with a sandbox mode and they are planning to add mining as an option to get gems, which should help with the economy just a bit.

I'd say give it a go if you like what you see. It's not really your typical strategy game and you need to be a bit patient (or increase the game speed using the game speed buttons) with your economy. It requires different sort of planning that most other strategy games I've played so far. The story is a bit meh but the levels are interesting and will present you with a nice mix of puzzles to solve.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.