The game can only be described as a puzzle/platformer game, where your only weapon in defeating the evil Professor Elvin Atombender – a man who is believed to be tampering with national security computers – is your ability to jump. Players begin in the Professor’s stronghold where you’re required to search a few dozen rooms for all the password pieces that are required to open the main control room – where the evil Professor is hiding. Naturally, the stronghold is crawling with patrolling robots whose intentions are to prevent you from reaching the Professor before time runs out, and he fires a deadly missile. The remake now allows players to find all puzzle pieces within 8hrs, though you can change the difficultly back to the original's 6hr limit.
Each time you play the game, the location of rooms will alter; making the game slightly fresher each time you play. Robots also have various movement and aggression patterns. Some robots will try to zap you as soon as they see you, while others will stay stationary or follow a linear path. To add even more strategy to the game, Impossible Mission uses lifts that can either move up or down, which often helps to avoid robots or to reach destinations quicker - if you plan everything out correctly. Before jumping into a room (no pun intended), it’s important to understand each robot’s movement patterns and the formation of the lifts. If you don’t, you can often get stuck and waste further time; or worst yet, you could get caught by one of the robots which results in a small time reduction.
The old C64 version.
Searching objects in rooms provides several items – puzzle pieces, lift resets or robot immobilizes. Puzzle pieces are ideally what you want to find, and find quickly, though the other two items offer additional help in succeeding much quicker. Lift resets are generally helpful if you manage to find yourself stuck without a lift to elevate you to higher ground, or to lower floors. While lift resets aren’t used too frequently, you’ll certainly want to hoard as many robot immobilizes as possible. This item allows you to temporary immobilize all robots that are in the room, which is something you’re often forced to use if certain robots won’t allow you much room to work in. Activating these two items is done by the computer terminals that are found in each room.
As soon as you’ve recovered all of the puzzle pieces, you’ll then be faced with a further task of forming all these pieces into nine separate keycards. The puzzle pieces are ironically puzzles in themselves, with each fitting perfectly in place with other pieces – sort of like a small jigsaw puzzle. With the DS, you’ll be able to rotate the pieces and hope to combine them with others.
Impossible Mission for the DS includes three methods of play – Original, Enhanced and Hybrid. Original is merely Impossible Mission that players will remember exactly from the C64 days, Enhanced adds a few touch ups including graphical changes, audio adjustments and the ability to play as three playable characters (a female, a male and a robot-male character), and finally Hybrid combines the first two modes together. There isn’t a great deal of difference outside of graphical and audio adjustments between these modes though. So, unless you want to hear the muffled audio from the original, chances are you’ll be sticking with the Enhanced mode.
Times have certainly changed.
Probably the biggest downfall to Impossible Mission is that what was possibly a good gameplay structure back on the C64, it just isn’t that compelling by today's standards. Another major downside is that the rooms, the robot movements and the puzzles all become second-nature as soon as you’ve finished the game a handful of times. You’ll be able to memorise the precise jump methods to reach certain objects, you’ll discover a strategy to avoid all robots and the puzzle formations will become far too obvious. If System 3 managed to implement a randomize feature that would mix up the puzzles, robot layout and room variation more frequently, then the game would’ve held a lot more substance and longevity than what already exist.
Graphics and audio are only mere distractions in a puzzle game like Impossible Mission. While neither of them are stellar, the game isn’t at all faulted because of this; they fit well in the context of the game, and that’s all that matters. Readers familiar with the original C64 version will be pleased to hear that the remake does include a graphical and audio overhaul though. Things look much cleaner, and the animation of your character is much more fluid.
Actual DS features are minimal. The top screen is used as a convenient map that tracks which rooms you have visited, meanwhile the bottom screen is where all the core gameplay takes place. The touch-screen is only used to navigate the main menu, to activate items, and to combine puzzle pieces. While the use of the exclusive DS features is minimal, there really isn’t much else that could’ve been incorporate.
The value of this title largely depends on what you expected from this remake. If you were after a portable Impossible Mission with a minor coat of new paint, then this is probably a good investment, though if you’re hoping for a puzzle game that has plenty of depth, longevity and is cheap then look elsewhere because Impossible Mission is not that game. At AU$49, it’s a tough ask to expect too many people to be convinced by this fairly ordinary remake.
But the recognition of puzzles, rooms and robots becomes all too familiar. There isn't really much longevity involved in the game, in my opinion.
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