Millie Review (Switch eShop)

Jumping ship from the mobile market to Nintendo Switch, Forever Entertainment’s Millie promises to be a, “joyful, casual puzzle game that will tease both your wits and your memory,” but it forgot to mention another quality needed to properly enjoy this one: patience. Tread on your 100 legs lightly….

Equal parts Pac-Man (the maze structures and pellet eating) and Snake (you get bigger the more you eat) each level sees you trying to reach a set pellet count before the exit hole opens up that will let you progress to the next level. This Switch version immediately provides superior controls thanks to physical button input rather then touchscreen controls used to move the titular millipede around. However the game’s level design carries over from the mobile version and these can become the real deal breaker here. 

From the nearly 100 levels and three different environments, the first few are quite manageable and give you a good ongoing tutorial about the different items Millie can use to bash in walls, travel in one way corridors and other such gameplay eccentricities such as under and over passes. However, later levels are so huge and filled with lethal choke points that even with the zoom button you will not be able to properly judge your correct path except trough trial and error.

This is where the your levels of patience come into play; one would not expect a game with such lovely, kid friendly graphics and jolly music to become an exercise of frustration but you will eventually run into said frustration after you've run into your body a few times while tackling the mazes Millie must conquer to become an air plane pilot. You read that correctly, the plot makes no sense. Even the youngest of gamers would question if the proper way to learn how to operate an air plane is to correctly manage your size while traversing mazes...

Items such as the scissors (which enable you to cut up some of Millie's size) and the all important clock (which handily rewinds the action a few seconds before you made that inevitable bad turn that leads your head straight into your body) become fundamental to tackle later stages, but their uses are limited. Fortunately, the 'Store' option on Switch enables you to buy packs of them for in-game stars you are awarded for level completion (instead of via real life currency like in the mobile version). 

Even if you don’t run out of them it is possible to make a mistake that will force you to restart the whole level again - quite a disappointment when you have been running around for the past 10 minutes only to realise your initial path decision led you to your ultimate demise. Oh, there are indeed airplanes in the game, not that you would notice. They feature in the three mini-games you will be able to unlock - which play nothing like the maze running core gameplay of the game. So there's that.