The Mims beginning is a God-like strategy game where you control the titular group of aliens; building them structures, creating livestock and using PSI powers to assist them in their daily lives. There are 3 main resources which you can cultivate for your Mims. Creating livestock in your labs allows you, once they have reached adulthood, to sell them in the space market which will net you blue gems; one of the main currencies in the game that allow you to build stuff and upgrade structures.
Another one of the resources is PSI energy that slowly regenerates through a massive tower, acts like your main hub. PSI energy allows you to use your unique powers, which is located on the right-hand tab. Here you can use 15 powers which gradually unlocks as you progress through the story.
The last resource is biomass, which you can accumulate by harvesting plants and throwing them into an extractor, then be stored in silos. Using biomass and blue gems will allow you to create new species to farm and then sell at space market. Each creature you create will feed on different types of fruit that you’ve created or planted. Once that creature has entered adulthood, they can be sold at the space market in exchange for more gems.
This is the basic cycle of the Mims Beginning; create biomass, earn gems, create livestock to sell and use your unique PSI powers to attack or help your Mims to grow their settlements. I found the progression a bit too slow for my liking when starting off and there was little to much information to take in.
As you construct new buildings for your Mims to use and create new plant and animal life to extract and sell; there is a risk that these will attract pests and predators. This is where you can use your PSI energy and take down enemies with a few cosmic abilities or use brute force by allowing your soldiers to do dirty work… if they don’t run away first though. The story moves slowly after completing a series of missions that see you building certain structures and defeating certain threats and completing some secondary objectives. While I wasn’t hugely taken with the story, I enjoyed building and taking the necessary steps to create a more secure environment for my Mims.
There are some minor issues I found when playing the game. The building interface was a little chunky to use, and the descriptions were rather small and difficult to read. Also, trying to order a group of soldiers Mims to assist with an invasion on your base proved to be really frustrating. As most of the time when I sent my soldiers into battle they would become overwhelmed far too easily and ran away scared. This made the task of protecting workers needlessly frustrating.
Also during the main story missions there wasn’t a lot of space and time to build structures as some of the maps are quite cramped with trees and other objects; which isn’t a problem at first glance but once I realised that all my structures needed a large amount of space to build them it soon became an issue.
There is another mode available which I found I had a lot more freedom with. In the survival mode, you can change a wealth of options which does away with a lot of constraints I found in the main game, which I really liked a lot. Sadly, most maps are locked until you’ve played them in story mode, which is a shame. I suppose it offers some unlockable content replay value.