Developer: Relic Entertainment, Nordic Games
Publisher: Nordic Games
Platforms: PC
Tested on: PC
Impossible Creatures – Review
Revisiting old games from your childhood is always a fun thing to do but sadly most of them don’t work anymore after all that time. Luckily for the Impossible Creatures players, 13 years after the original release, there’s now a re-release available that works smoothly on modern platforms. Relive the 1930’s world filled with actual impossible creatures and use the world’s greatest building blocks: animals.
Story
In Impossible Creatures, you play as Rex Chance, the protagonist. You’re the son of the genius scientist Dr. Eric Chanikov, who was the cause of the Tunguska Event after a failed experiment. Your father exiled himself to a remote island where he created the Sigma Technology, a technology that can fuse animals together into one. Suddenly in 1937, you get a letter from your father asking you to come to him for his final moments. You rush to the islands only to find that he’s gone. Now, you must find your father and defeat anyone who means harm with the Sigma Technology, which turns out to be harder than expected and leads to unexpected events…
The story in Impossible Creatures is quite interesting. It’s not the most coherent or spectacular story ever in a video game, but it’s good enough to keep you going. You’re constantly puzzled with new discoveries as you fight your way to your dad and further. It also has very nice cutscenes which provide some backstory as to what Rex is actually thinking about.
Graphics
Graphics wise, Impossible Creatures hasn’t changed a whole lot since the release. Of course there’s support for increased resolution but that’s pretty much it. However, it still looks quite nice and some aspects might even look better than a lot of early access games nowadays. There’s a couple of different maps ranging from snow to safari, each with their own graphical style, which is of course a nice sight.
However, while the game isn’t demanding at all because it’s so old, the engine does seem to have some issues. When starting the game, it didn’t start for some reason and the error log didn’t help any non-developer out either. While digging around, it turns out that the engine will crash on PC’s that have a comma as a decimal separator instead of a dot. Luckily, it was easily fixed by changing this around in the control panel.
Sound
The sounds and music in Impossible Creatures are quit good, albeit low quality (but this is to be expected). There’s a good variety of music and sound effects for all of the creatures you can make, and there’s a lot of creature combinations. However, sometimes the “your creatures are under attack!” shout gets quite annoying because it even plays while you’re looking at the fight.
Gameplay
As said, Impossible Creatures is a pure real time strategy game that’s set in an imaginative world. The controls are quite simple and everything is explained in detail in the tutorial, which is always a nice thing to do. However, some keybinds aren’t that great, the game sometimes requires you to press L for example, while most modern strategy games can be played with your left hand and mouse but this is just a minor issue.
Impossible Creatures is a pretty solid game overall. It features a lot of elements that you also see in modern day strategy games like hotkeys, a nice minimap, unit groups, rally points and much more. This isn’t that surprising though because strategy games were quite a big thing back then with titles like Warcraft and many more.
As expected, you have one main building which is actually your hovercraft you use to travel in between the island chain in the campaign. Here, you can do basic research and recruit workers. Workers can be used to mine coal and build structures, nothing fancy here. Impossible Creatures features two main resources: coal and electricity. Coal can be gained from coal patches and you can get electricity from building generators around your base or on top of geysers, which produce more electricity.
You can then build your creature chamber (barracks) and some other structures which allow you to make flying units and aquatic units, which are awesome. There’s also the possibility for defense turrets, research buildings and more, you probably get the point by now, it features the things you’d expect from a good strategy game.
The one huge feature Impossible Creatures has is the army builder. You can actually make your own units and combine them however you like, there’s no standard units in the game which everyone can build. In the campaign, Rex can hunt animals to collect them for the creature chamber. With some help of Sigma Technology, you can start assembling your own units by combining two different animals. You can do everything you want and select which body parts should come from which animal, like crossing a baboon with a cheetah or a lobster with a polar bear, the possibilities are endless.
Once you’ve played through the whole campaign, you can jump into the other game modes (or you can do that right away, we don’t judge). You can play skirmishes against a PC or go all out and join the multiplayer where you can play with up to six players at the same time. The games actually have quite a bit of settings you can tweak, like the resources, map, add-ons, unit cap (50 or 75), game speed, cheats and many more. You can also take a pick between six different armies from the characters in the campaign or make your own custom army and see how it adds up against the pre-made ones. If all of that isn’t enough for you, you can make your own levels with the Editor or play Insect Invasion or some of the other add-ons that are available.
Conclusion
All in all, after such a long time and not a whole lot of adjustments from the development team, Impossible Creatures is still a great game. It has everything you want from a strategy game and has a ton of options for customizing your army. However, some mechanics and keybinds do feel a little bit outdated and the engine makes a little hiccup now and then, but the developers are actively resolving issues on the Steam discussion forum.
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