L.G.C. |Reviews| — The Mims: Beginning

Your intrepid heroes right-click, scroll-click, and rotate. The Mims: Beginning faces the CHAIRQUISITION!

Game: The Mims Beginning
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/337820/
Devel: Squatting Penguins
Engine: Unity 4.6
Price: € 16.99 / US$ 19.99 / CDN$ 21.99

Wazzat: Experience the mysterious and mystical by taking on a journey with Mims in this strategic god-like game. Create structures, plant vegetation, breed animals, take care of your minions, use divine PSI powers, triumph in face of natural disasters, fight monsters, predict the future, and so much more.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Makes with the working

V-

Does not pass the 1080 to 2160 resolution test of change.
Really struggles to hit 60 @1080 sometimes dropping down in the 20’s.
No save system.
And when asked the devels whipped out the “small indie team” card.
“Maybe in AAA games mid savegame is standard this is why people are accustomed to this option.”

J-

I didn’t have any real issues getting the game running
I don’t think the lack of a save system should result in a chair being dinged for makes with the working. No, that chair gets ripped out elsewhere

P-

I can tell this is a Unity 4.0 series game because it attempted to fullscreen in 1920×1200 into both my monitors.
When I corrected it, it also refused to obey the primary monitor setting and decided to spawn on the right screen, instead of the left one.
Oh and the buffer underruns are real.
I thought setting the latency in the pulseaudio daemon.conf file, like I do with every fresh install, would be enough.
Not for this game!
I dare you to try and listen to a Youtube video while playing this!

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

V-

If you look at the screenshots on their Steam page you might be slightly impressed.
Don’t! Jaggies, jaggies everywhere!
While the antialiasing technically “works” you need to be face-first into a 28 inch monitor to tell the difference between naught and 8X.
And that’s only made worse by graphics straight out of 2003… I’m being generous.
There is no voice work to speak of and the floaty background music will nope you to sleep quicker than a Rohypnol smoothie.
- Chatrealm, don’t even think about it.

J-

The visual offerings here are pretty meh
I’m usually the one getting all of the buffer underruns, so it’s weird that I don’t get it
Still, the sounds aren’t anything memorable
In fact, I literally can’t describe them.

P-

There are definitely sounds there.
But most of what I heard was the static-y garbled mess from the Alsa plugin causing buffer underruns with pulseaudio.
The graphics… It’s Unity 4.
Even the Anti-Aliasing doesn’t work.

Total-

Control

V-

Whoever decided Right-click + Scroll-click =’s rotate should be spanked with a shaved weasel.
Good thing you can rebind the contro…. Oh, wait.
Welcome to 2016, bitch-es!
Hell most controllas are rebindable in 2016 but you couldn’t be bothered to sort the gerbil/keyboard?

J-

The keyboard controls are all over the place
Screen rotation should not work this way! Q goes counterclockwise, e goes clockwise. Everyone else figured it out
Beyond that, everything else is point and click, and click and point
Seriously though. -2 Chairs for thinking you can fix screen rotation

P-

You use your scroll wheel to zoom in and out
You use your arrow keys/WASD to move the camera
You’d expect clicking either the wheel or the right click and dragging the mouse, would rotate the camera.
Ahahahahahahahah! No.
Venn wasn’t kidding when he said you need to hold down both the wheel and the right click to spin the camera.
What kind of game development background do you have to be brought up in, for that to make sense.
And no, you can’t rebind controls either.

Total-

FUN

V-

I’m not a fan of hand holding but FFS give me the slightest idea.
The game thinks it’s being “hard” by saying it will not provide additional hints (after never providing hints) but that just translates to “we never made a proper tutorial”
If I’m heading over to the Tubes to figure out step FK mothering 1, ya done goofed.
And to add insult to injury it only saves after each mission (avg 1hr)
You can’t make this shite up, people!
Anywho, I ran out of gems and you see, that’s an issue.
Since I was using them to purchace fks given.

J-

The tutorial definitely shows you what you need to build
Does a pretty rubbish job of explaining why you need to build it, but it’s not that complicated
And really, this game isn’t all that complicated. What it is is boring.
I’ve never been that big a fan of god games. I played a little bit of black and white back in the day, and it didn’t tickle anything
This game won’t change your mind about the genre in the least
Yeah, the gem shortage will really screw you over. Sometimes you need to do a specific build just to have enough to squeak by with the objective.

P-

This game adheres to the “Tell, don’t show” school of design.
It tells you, in a screen-filling opaque wall of text, that space chicken you grew was taken to the spaceport and somehow that helps.
It tells you the Mims now consider you their deity, even though all you see is a bunch of semi-transparent buildings while your fingers hover over the ALT and F4 keys.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Before I tear into The Mims any further, I would like to say: I don’t like god-games.
They take real-time strategy, which I also don’t like, and introduce a degree of stupid.
You’re not a commander with soldiers obeying your every order.
You’re a deity, literally giving out suggestions to beings of limited intelligence.
- And if they they don’t adhere to said suggestions, you get to go fullmetal Old Testament on their ass!
It’s basically slavery of the mentally sub-normal.
I guess that’s why most god games don’t often portray the lot you’re looking after as human.
I just noticed something! This game is so not my bag I’d rather waffle than actually talk about it, specifically.
And the exact same thing happened while I was trying to play it.
At one point I got up and decided to vacuum the apartment instead of playing The Mims.
Because if I’m going to be doing menial tasks, I’ll do them where they matter.
That and I don’t get people who play video games to recreate that feeling of watching an ant farm.
Because that is exactly the degree of agency you have in this game.