Impossible Creatures

Wannabe geneticist John Gillooly goes all Mendel over this game.

In these heady days of stem cell research and genome mapping it is refreshing to slide back to a simpler time, when there were no geneticists, just mad scientists creating horrible mutant creatures the traditional way: with a lot of electricity and maniacal laughter.

Impossible Creatures is such a tool of scientific bastardry. Rather than being an everyday Real Time Strategy title, developer Relic has gone back to the drawing board and redesigned some fundamental aspects of the genre (while borrowing the customisable unit concept from Dark Reign). The centrepiece to Impossible Creatures is a system of building new combat units out of the bits of different animals, creating horrible monstrosities along the path to victory.

Underneath is fairly standard RTS fare. You are based out of a mobile laboratory, a flying train designed to move between the islands of a mysterious pacific archipelago as you avenge your father's death during the main campaign or just cause some chaos in the skirmish mode.

You hire henchmen who build new structures and mine coal, which is one of the two major resources. The other resource is electricity, generated by lightening rods or generators that tap into steam vents.

But the major gameplay focus is on the critters. In the campaign game you need to use the main character, Max, to hunt animals for DNA samples during the course of each mission.

Once you have a sample you can start building your new units. Each unit is built from two different creatures, and you have control over around five or six of the body parts on most creatures. By combining different limbs and other bits you can tailor the critter to have the best possible mix of skills and special attributes. Certain animals become regular bases for your creatures, especially in the early stages of the campaign where the choice of animals is particularly restrictive. You can only have a total of nine animals in your army and there are infinite hours of unit tweaking and testing to be had in the search for the perfect army.

Impossible Creatures' campaign is well polished, bearing Relic's traditional cartoon-style cutscenes and a storyline filled with quirky and offbeat characters like uber-baddie Upton Julius or nasty whaler Whitey Hooten. You progress across the archipelago searching for clues to your father's death, in the process experiencing a gradual change of climates and hence wildlife. The storyline is good but not really the kind that sucks you in and ruins your life. Multiplayer or single player skirmish are where the longevity of the game will come from.

As the game is focused on unit creation and tweaking, multiplayer is set to become an ever-evolving beast. If there is one certainty, it is that your first stab at creating a unit will probably be a horrific disaster. Only over time will the relative strengths and weaknesses of you units become apparent, but thankfully the game ships with a huge range of pre-designed creatures.

Balance is the key. You will soon find the reason your melee units are getting killed so quickly is because your grossly overpowered ranged units are doing area damage thus negating their advantage, or your giant flying sperm whale can decimate the enemy with a single tail swipe but it moves at such a glacial speed that it is useless. Getting the right mix of all these things is the key to Impossible Creatures, and sets it up as a potentially killer multiplayer title.

Relic made itself famous with a little game called Homeworld, which happened to feature one of the most gorgeous and innovative game engines so far. Impossible Creatures does not live up to this level of visual richness, but it features a smooth next generation 3D engine that does not disappoint. The creatures look fantastic, which is testament to a lot of time spent by Relic getting the disparate pieces of animal anatomy to join together in smooth ways. To get the most out of the game you probably want to be running with antialiasing on, as the edges do get annoying, but this is the only real gripe with it.

While Impossible Creatures is a polished, innovative game, it just seems to be missing a certain something that could propel it into the ranks of greatness. It is definitely the most different RTS that you will play this year and with the dedication of a little time and some frustrating moments it could well be a game to feature heavily on the Net and at LANs around the country.