Impossible Creatures Review

Relic Entertainment, the developer of Impossible Creatures, earned widespread recognition in 1999 with the release of its first product, the sci-fi-themed real-time strategy game Homeworld. Homeworld was unlike any other game in the genre before it, due to its effective, stylish use of a fully 3D perspective. An excellent single-player campaign, impressive visuals, and solid multiplayer helped make Homeworld an outstanding game, and though several games have attempted to surpass its accomplishments these past few years, arguably none have truly succeeded. Now Homeworld's creators have finally completed their second real-time strategy game, which was more than three years in the making, no doubt because play-balancing the game's open-ended army building system must have been a nightmare. Impossible Creatures is superficially as different as can be from Relic's first game, eschewing Homeworld's serious tone for one that's much more lighthearted, and taking place along a small, fictitious South American archipelago, circa 1937. In the game, you create your armies by combining pairs of real-life creatures to form bizarre, powerful hybrids: The tiger-headed scorpion depicted on the game's box is a perfect example. And though the actual battles in Impossible Creatures aren't all that great, the game's offbeat premise, good looks, enjoyable campaign, and open-ended design make it both distinctive and recommendable.

Impossible Creatures' hybrid units are more fun to build than to battle.

During the game's protracted development cycle, it actually underwent no fewer than two official name changes, first from just plain Sigma to the obligatorily subtitled Sigma: The Adventures of Rex Chance and then finally to Impossible Creatures. The game's original titles remain significant to the story: Rex Chance is the Indiana Jones-like main character, and Sigma is the mysterious The Island of Dr. Moreau-like technology that Rex uses to fuse animals together to create hybrids. Rex Chance's adventures begin when he receives a letter from his long-lost father, urging him to visit a little-known South American island where Sigma research is being conducted. Not long after his arrival, Rex has a bad run-in with some hybrid creatures bent on having him for dinner, but he's saved by the talented young Doctor Lucy Willing, who whisks him away in her hovertrain laboratory. Thus begins Rex's quest to discover his father's fate and defeat the villainous Upton Julius, a man who would use the Sigma technology to rule the world. Of course, Rex and Lucy will have to get through several of Julius' cohorts before they can get to him.

The single-player campaign that tells this story is lengthy, challenging, and engaging, offering a variety of objectives within most every mission, a good number of surprises, and plenty of amusing cutscenes. The campaign is probably the best part of the game. Your average RTS campaign always starts you off with weak units and limited technology and then gives you access to more powerful stuff as the missions wear on; Impossible Creatures is no different, but the way you acquire new and better stuff over the course of the missions is pretty novel. Specifically, you'll need to use Rex and his tranquilizer rifle to "tag" new animals for their genetic material, and you'll need to use Lucy to steal plans for new technology from your enemies. Since you'll usually get several new creatures per mission, you'll always be looking forward to which of the game's 50 or so stock creatures you'll find next and what sorts of bizarre yet effective hybrids you can make as a result.

Shocking! A scorpion with the pincers and hindquarters of a lobster!

A thorough tutorial is available before you begin the campaign, though if you've played any other recent real-time strategy game, most all of it will be familiar territory. However, Impossible Creatures' army building system is decidedly unusual. You pair up two creatures at a time and then mix and match their torsos and appendages to produce various types of combat units. The game includes a number of prepackaged armies, though you'll certainly want to experiment with making your own, since much of your enjoyment of Impossible Creatures will come from thinking up strategies and creating armies around them. Part of what makes the campaign fun is that you can edit your armies on the fly, whenever you want, though you need to preassemble armies in advance for use in multiplayer matches or skirmishes. Either way, the interface for the creature combiner is very clean and simple--almost too much so, as none of the humor, personality, or style of the game really comes across when you're building units, and you don't actually get to see the process of two creatures getting hybridized, only the end result.

At any rate, it won't be long before you're combining elephants, dragonflies, killer whales, panthers, spitting cobras, grizzly bears, snowy owls, piranhas, and more, each time examining how your new combination affects the resulting hybrid's core attributes like health, speed, attack, and defense. The system is about as intuitive as can be expected; put a snapping turtle's legs on a cheetah and it's going to slow down. Put an eagle's head on an elephant and it'll see farther. The resulting hybrid creatures may look silly, but in practice they're not so different from what you'd find in a typical real-time strategy game. Think of the fast creatures as your infantry, the slow and tough creatures as your tanks, and the ranged attack creatures as your artillery, and you'll find that Impossible Creatures' battles play out pretty much just like those of an old Command & Conquer game. You can create swimming, amphibious, or flying creatures, and some have one or more special abilities--but despite all the possible combinations, none of the beasts you can concoct in Impossible Creatures is really all that different from the typical sorts of units you'd find in any real-time strategy game.