GAMES REVIEW: Calling All Mixels

The Mixels look ugly.

Had to get that quickly out of the way. For me, these little “things” look like enemies that you would blast in a space invaders game or be part of the antagonistic forces, not what you would play as. But I can’t dwell on that when there’s a whole game to rip apart.

From what I know from just the word of mouth, Mixels is the latest in Legos toy campaigns who’s toy gimmick is that you can MIX parts between each of the models to make a new one… just like you could do with regular Legos but let’s ignore that. The Mixels also have an online series which John has been reviewing for the past few weeks. So with the show and game you, the consumer, have two routes to see whether you should spend your money on more plastic toys, and while John takes the show I’ll handle the game.

The contextual story of the game is the Mixels enemy, the Nixels (creativity at its finest) have kidnapped almost all the Mixels except for one. Now you as the lone Mixel must traverse the three lands; Infernite Land, Electrod Land, and Cragster Land, find your friends and stop the evil Nixels by completing a wide assortment of missions. While also running back to your base to play a psedo-tower defence game.

Calling All Mixels is a real time strategy game, where you and your chosen three Mixels run throughout the levels collect various items to use to buy better denseness and such for your tower. Basic movement is dictated by you dragging your finger along the screen in the direction you want to go, and to attack specific enemies you click your Mixels personalized attack under his picture at the bottom of the screen. On a surface level the mechanics work adequate but Calling All Mixels fails in the worst possible way. It’s boring.

Fighting and travelling is such a mindless chore to do, every fight basically works like this you and your Mixels run into some Nixels which will then lock the screen until you have defeated every Nixel on screen. Now here’s where the problems kick in. Firstly because the camera is SO far away every Nixel at the beginning of the game looks like a dot, making it impossible to try and specifically attack a target. Second, there is zero strategy to the game. Comparing it to South Park: The Stick of Truth (more comparing their play style rather than project scope) its battle system utilized multiple attacks, buffs and debuffs, and shielding mechanics to make each battle a puzzle for you. A puzzle to figure out the best method to dispatch the opponent. Here however, just rush every enemy and mash all the buttons, you’ll win.

Although to be fair this strategy will probably only work on the easy setting of the missions. If you brought it up one level, this strategy would get destroyed because A) there’s no tactical advantage to rushing in like an idiot and B) the indication for your health and how low it has become is just crap. Several times I forgot I had a health bar because it’s just a two by ten pixel line. User interface overall is pretty mishandled in that regard. But the game not only has a bad health bar you can’t see, you barely can see your own Mixels, leading to the wonderful getting stuck on pathway edges glitch. If the camera was focused on ONE Mixel and was zoomed in I think we would be able to SEE what we want to see.

Oh yeah and I almost forgot, the Mixels trademark mixing. In every battle you are allowed to mix your Mixels among the three you bring and each mixture gives you a powerful attack that you can abuse to hell until the fights over. I guess the reason I waited so long to talk about it is because it’s a hassle to use. First you gotta elect mid-battle which Mixel you want to start the mix with, then click the mix button, then click one of the other two mixes to mix with, and then click the rainbow button to complete the mixture. And thanks to the small U.I. my aft fingers kept selecting the wrong Mixels and failing each time. So, I ended up just spamming their regular attacks and it turned out fine.

Without even bringing in the stock and even more boring Tower defence mini-game where every fe minutes you gotta protect your base from Nixel attack, Calling All Mixels is just a mishandled game. The RTS element could work but due to the lack of diversity in combat plus the awful user interface every battle and backtrack through these huge levels makes the game slow, monotonous and BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORING. The game has not made me interested in buying any of the toys or watching the series. However this game I want to clarify is not the worst but I can’t find myself really finding anything that I could recommend to anyone especially to anyone who has awful eyesight.