Biology Getting Freaky: Oldies but Goldies

There was an age when strategy games ruled the PC gaming scene, aka the best days of PC gaming (sort of)

Among amazing titles like Warcraft, Age of Empires, Red Alert, Civilization etc there were always the few zany or ambitious ones trying new ideas. Your Battle Realms, Emperor: Battle for Dune and off course Impossible Creatures.

Impossible Creatures is a game developed by Microsft which approaches units a bit unconventionally. To create creatures you have to combine two others in an animorphs like fashion to create weird looking animals that you will use to fight other weird animals and destroy the enemy base.

You want an elephant with the wings of an owl, talons and the size of said owl? You got it
You want an orca mixed with a wolf running around like no ones bussiness? Go ahead!
You want a tiger mixed with a scorpion adding a venomous tail and pincers to an already lethal murder cat? Well...

In detail, impossible creatures is a story driven RTS in which you follow the story of Rex Chance our generic badass named protagonist in an alternate 1940's esque timeline.

Somewhere in the islands of the Pacific ocean Rex goes to investigate a mysterious letter from his father, or investigates his father's dissappearance or whatever. Unimportant. What -is- important is that while doing said investigation he meets a sassy british lady Lucy Willing a brilliant scientist who will tag along and help Rex in his adventure.

In each level you are tasked with hunting down animals, putting them to sleep, collecting dna samples to broaden your dna library and use said library to combine and make more awesome and versatile creatures to fight your enemies with.

Best. Game. Ever!

Other than that it is a pretty standard RTS game. You have your minion henchmen that will gather coal, which is the primary resource. Build your buildings and generators to produce electricity (the secondary resource) and any building you might need, from base defences to unit upgrades.

In all honesty this game deserves a lot more praise. The graphics are pretty good for its age, with excelent animations and cinematics as one would expect from microsoft, and with a plethora of animals to pick from, you can spent hours upon hours just making your own little adorable little fuzzy beasts of murder and mayhem. But, lets get into it in detail

The Good

Graphics: With solid animations, colorful artwork and smooth as hell motion, the game looks pretty even to this day

Sound: Music is fun to listen to, especially the main menu theme. Sound effects are pretty decent and all but my personal favorite part of this game is the voice acting. This game came out at a time when Microsoft put money where its worth when it came to making games, and all of them had this steampunkish adventure feel that it is present here as well. Sure The entire thing may remind you of a Disney film, but that, for me, works to its benefit. Over the top characters with accents and exaggerated emotions followed with similar voice acting? Sign me up!

Unethical DNA animal splicing: It is -THE- best. I do not care about the morals of bioethics right now, all I care is that I get to combine my favorite animals to create a super animal with stretched abilities to tear down my enemies. I can make a land walking wolf-shark, an electricity shooting hawk, a scorpion tiger burrowing underground to ambush. It. is. the. best.

The Bad

Replayability: The multiplayer skirmish mode is just you making a custom set of creatures fighting against other custom sets. I guess it -could- be fun with friends, but ultimately...we know they wont join. As far as the single player campaign, it is lengthy and fun, but ultimately why play it again? You will find yourself just playing skirmishes over and over

Variety: Despite the animals offering a wide variety of choices, they are not enough to offer -endless- variations. As such eventually you will discover the best options and make your dream set of creatures and just use them to pummel through everything.