Impossible Mission

Genre: Puzzle / Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

Impossible Mission (not to be confused with the Mission: Impossible franchise) was originally released on the Commodore 64 platform in 1984, and regularly features of “Best of” lists for that platform. In 2007, the game was ported to PlayStation Portable, Wii, and Nintendo DS with optional remade graphics and modernized quality of life features. That version of the game was ported to the Nintendo Switch in 2019.

The original game featured pixel art visuals with some okay animation, a minimalist soundtrack, and some digitized speech that was surprisingly competent for the era, albeit extremely cheesy (“Stay a while… stay forever!”). The remade visuals feature more modern 2D visuals, also with some decent animation (but low-resolution and dated, with some visual flaws like ugly square edges like the visuals were copy-pasted into the game wrong), but with everything else remaining the same. This game also has a mode that combines the two, letting you play with the old-fashioned character on the modern backgrounds. It’s a welcome addition, but not one that has aged well since 2007.

For the gameplay, one of the nice additions this time around is a tutorial to tell players just what the heck they’re doing. The game has players using elevators to get to various rooms in a complex, each patrolled by a few different types of robots. Players must avoid the robots and search furniture and objects in the room to uncover puzzle pieces as well as power-ups that can be activated at computers to reset elevator lifts in the rooms or temporarily deactivate the robots. Players are given a time limit to search all of the rooms and assemble all of the puzzle pieces, with deaths from robots and bottomless pits deducting from your time rather than a life total.

It’s an interesting concept, but an extremely difficult game. Your character has some pretty good horizontal jumping ability but isn’t a great vertical jumper, and their precision with jumps is lousy. Any slip-ups with robots results in an automatic reset to the room’s lifts and a deduction from the timer, meaning if you made progress getting past some difficult hazards to get to the far end of a room, only to die right before searching the last vending machine, you’ll have to start the room over from the beginning.

The puzzle pieces are another quirk of this game that, while an interesting idea, doesn’t quite seem to fit. The ultimate goal is collecting all of these and then matching up groups of them, flipping them horizontally and vertically and matching colors to get them to clear. But it’s not always evident when two pieces fit together, and the interface for doing this is really clunky. It definitely seems like the touchscreen that was undoubtedly in the Nintendo DS version of the game would be the best way to play this portion of the game, and sadly it does not appear as if touchscreen support has been added to the Nintendo Switch version of the game.

There’s one more thing I need to address here – this release’s price of $15 is absolutely outrageous. While this version does add some nice graphical options and quality-of-life features to the game, these do not justify such a massively-bloated price on a game that is now 40 years old.

I have fond memories of the Commodore 64, but that was a very long time ago, and honestly if this was one of the best games on that platform, it speaks to how poorly games of that era have aged. This game may appeal to players who have nostalgia for this era or a curiosity about what us old folks were playing way back in the day, but everyone else is better off skipping it, especially with this release’s absurdly overpriced asking price.

tl;dr – Impossible Mission is a Platforming game with Puzzle elements that’s often seen as one of the classics of the Commodore 64 platform, but sadly it has not aged well, and while this release does add a few graphical enhancements and quality-of-life features, these additions do not justify the absurd $15 price tag for a 40 year-old game. Unless you’re wearing nostalgia goggles that can blind you to how poorly-aged and overpriced this game is, skip it.

Grade: D+

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