In this one year alone, I have gone through various incarnations of the real-time or just plain fantasy/science-fiction strategy genre. Starting with Warlords Battlecry 2, Age of Wonders 2, Warcraft 3, Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds and then through the Ages of Mythology.
Countless empires has I conquered, each as distinctive and memorable even after all this while. Impossible Creatures (IC) happens to be my most recent conquest. "Veni, Vidi, Vici" - as was proclaimed by Caesar.
This latest epoch is set in the 1930's era. The setting has an overall "old movie" feel to it.. the jokes in the dialogue, the funky-jazz music, the colourful interface and cartoony animals, the corny characters, heck it even has a flying steam-punk train as your mobile base.
Impossible Creatures stars Rex Chance as the main character. The adventure begins when he receives a shocking email, ooops my bad.. I mean "letter" from his long-lost father of 30 years. Arriving at the island where his estranged father supposedly been hiding, he will come face-to-face with the pets of Upton Julius. Caesar-wannabe with economic-power and megalomaniac-streak to back his claim to the world left in ruin after the devastation of The Great War (WWI).
Throughout the entire adventure, we will be entertained by the following parade of characters..
Lucy Willing, assistant to Rex's father and the token damsel-in-distress. Typical love-interest with a sharp mind and tough attitude to boot.
Whitey Hooten, gigantic ex-whaler with a fiery temper and legendary strength suitable for the purpose of reining the rest of Julius's lackeys in order.
Velika La Pette, ornithologist with a fashion sense that literally.. kills! Has set her paws and claws all over Julius. She is the fire that sparks the flame.
Otis Ganglion, evil veterinarian that has a sick habit of stitching and sawing up his patients. Beware of his Impossible Creatures Circus!
Additional well-acted characters do add up to the fun.. with chirpy eskimos, whiney islanders and several version of grunting disloyal cowardly henchmen.
Graphic : Fully 3D with rotational and zoomable viewing modes. The engine is smooth with the transition from top-down God-mode view or deliciously mouth-smacking with the maximum zoom while viewing your charging army hordes. The other mode of views can't beat the gorgeous large-scale view from WC3 or the beautiful-painting world view of AoM, but IC beats all the rest of the competition just for the fact that its truly breath-taking watching a raging battle using maximum zoom.. and still playable! (9/10)
Sound : The voice-acting is remarkable, especially so when its done to purposely emulate the feeling of movies from era gone-by. The music will lift up your spirit while the sound effects are commendable. Imagine the grunts, squeals, roars and various other sounds creatures will make while you are commanding them whether to guard your base or march to their death. Blast your eardrums insane with countless combination from the 61 fauna available. (9/10)
Interface : I must mention this part as I think IC got better interface overall compare to the rest of the competition, because of the ability to play with mouse alone! From my vast experience playing RTS games since the days of C&C till AoM, my worst complain is that we have to use keyboard to mark a group of our army. It's such a needless troublesome task! I understand that AoM does have the flag icons to mark groups, but the ease of marking groups in IC makes the task so enjoyable. I mean I always put Rex on no 1, Lucy on no 2, henchmen on no 0 and my various blends of critters on the rest of them. You never have to click farther than the circle in the center-bottom of the viewing map. (10/10)
Gameplay : Single-player has 15 extensive campaigns, which play like a well fleshed-out movie. Took me one whole week to play through, with nightly 4-8 hours sessions. Just enough enjoyment for our invested time and effort, unlike the campaigns of AoM that took me one whole month of torturous nightly 4-8 hours punishment sessions to complete! What is most fun about IC is when you burn those brain-cells trying to come up with best combination of creatures to take out specific challenges. Then again, once you found out the best combination, you will hardly experiment with lesser ideas. It is fun while it last, but isn't that the case with most RTS? How many times can you play one to death till you still having fresh enjoyment out of it? (6/10)
Movies : The story after every campaigns is revealed using a black and white animations and interaction-scenes done using the game's engine. Standard with every games nowadays, but the effort is appreciated nonetheless. Far below the standard of WC3 of course but comparable to the scenes of AoM. (7/10)
An underdog that is actually very well packaged. Hey, we must give them credit for linking the Tunguska Incident in Siberia with Nikola Tesla and putting King Kong (deja-vu?) somewhere in the story. Sigma Technology is a believable What-if? event and I hope there will be a follow-up to IC as the ending is purposely left open-ended.
This is basically SimLife and Unnatural Selection upgraded with modern graphic and sound. I know some people that bought IC just to see the effect of the combined creatures looks, just like what I did with SimLife. More creatures will be added by Relic and fans since this is a moddable game.
I only have trouble completing the missions where Rex has to follow those tracks and the one where Rex got a serious case of flu forced me to replay almost 10 times just to get it right. I either destroys the enemy base too fast before I got the whale or I took too long to get to the whale and the enemy churned up unbeatable numbers of critters.
Remember to check the Goodies folder on the CD to gain information of the 10 bonus animals. Although they do need to be unlocked, therefore I will share my tips on my favourite creatures, combination of the standard available monsters. I get by most of the game with my Rhino+Eel.
Eelephant for the range attack. Sharkrilla for the close-up frenzy massacre. Sperm Dragon (Whale+DragonFly) for the most damage from the air. Lobphant for the demolition invasion. Gorodile for the melee bruce-lee. Whagle for the air sonar. Eagster for the meteor garden. Hope you can figure out the obvious clue! Of course, the combinations with the bonus creatures are mind-boggling. The Moose alone has a drooling 21 combat damage ability.
This review is biased in the sense that I love animals. I even have Zoo Tycoon with both expansions, although hardly had time to play them yet. Folks that like to combines various parts of machines might not like this game, just as I am not inclined to same endeavor as I had already done that once with War Inc. Charge at your own peril, but please at least attempt to leap.
Pros : innovative idea, unique graphic, jungle sound-o-rama, intuitive interface, cool concept, incoming mods, informative tutorial, new game at $30 only, Microsoft = support & future
Cons : RTS-clone, pathetic multi-player scene, failed product, steep difficulty, lack of buildings and characters, DirectX 9 problems/bugs, not very-well known
Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted on 1/29/2003
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