Impossible Creatures demo...

[Jakub]

It wasn't all that exciting.

It's very cool to create new creatures, but it's difficult to fight against them. In the heat of combat, the last thing you want to have to do is look at an enemy creature and analyze its capabilities. This could lead to some interesting situations where you create something generally worthless except for its high hitpoints and defense, while your 'real' critters do the damage. In general though, it's going to be a hassle. That's too bad, because I found the actual battles to be rather enjoyable.

The writing for the singleplayer campaign is a notch below what I've come to expect. Considering the already deplorable state of writing and character logic in games, this is saying something.

The general style is a turn-off. Oh wow, a campy spoof of the Indiana Jones '30s. Except it's not funny or amusing. I also haven't felt so detached from a character since the idiotic human hero in the WarCraft III campaign.

I wish the game treated my intelligence with a modicum of respect.

[wumpus]

Where is the demo?

[DennyA]

It's apparently on the PC Gamer holiday issue disc.

However, since a number of online sites have zero respect for magazine "exclusive" demos, I fully expect it'll be all over the web soon.

[Mark Asher]

It's apparently on the PC Gamer holiday issue disc.

However, since a number of online sites have zero respect for magazine "exclusive" demos, I fully expect it'll be all over the web soon.

The magazine has been available for several days now and I've yet to find a download spot for the demo. Sites may have no respect for magazines, but they apparently have a lot of respect for the cost of bandwidth.

[wumpus]

Zing! So true, though.

[Anonymous]

game suXors. get a Xbox

[balut]

I got the demo in the latest issue of Maximum PC. Mixed reaction.

Animal construction is pretty cool, and with only a few monsters in the demo, you can really make some nice creatures. I spent more time actually making creatures than playing the game - I think my favorites were an Archerfish-Snow Owl combo that flew around and shot water bombs from its fish head; a Lemming-Porcupine combo that burrowed for defense but then popped out to shoot quills as a ranged attack; a Cheetah-Ram combo that runs really really fast for its horn-ram attack; and a Grizzly Bear-Wolverine combo that's just a slow, frenzying tank.

Actual gameplay, though, is pretty ordinary (I only tried the Skirmish mode, not Campaign). Build a base. Create peon-types. Have them gather resources and build buildings. Research new techs. Build base defenses and churn out troops. Animal selection in Skirmish is based on a preset "Creature Army" you assemble beforehand in the Animal Creator - you create 9 or so unique animal-combination units and save them for use in Skirmish. This is nice, because you can have the game analyze your army for you, pointing out its strengths and weaknesses in many categories.

Oh, resource model is akin to Total Annihilation, which alleviates some of the blah-ness of the standard RTS model. You need to collect 2 resources - Coal and Electricity. Peons mine coal on the map and drop them off at bases or workshops. Electricity, though, is generated at a steady rate through the construction of Lightning Rods (can be placed anywhere, but low elec output) or Power Generators (must be placed on steam-geysers, but high elec output). So, once you have the electrical output going, and nothing else is taking it up, you can pretty much leave it alone and focus on one resource and army management.

Skirmish in the demo was somewhat annoying in that the pre-made Army in the game has units unavailable to you in the Animal Creator. I was determined to use only the army set I had painstakingly created and customized in the Animal Creator, and when I played a CPU using the pre-made army, I ended up getting totally thrashed in the late game by animal types unavailable to me. Flying Owl-Sharks by the CPU could kill most of my level II and even level III units in one or two hits, and nothing available to me had a ranged attack strong enough to counter them. Even my best, sole level IV unit, my Grizzly-Wolverines, in a pack of frenzied fury, were no match for his Killer Whale-Musk Ox armies. Even more so in that they could flank around my forces through the water.

Overall, the demo shows that Impossible Creatures has promise, and is a very neat premise. Unfortunately, the actual RTS component is stuck in the same formula as every other RTS out there. Think of IC as a generic RTS with customizable armies.

Oh, and it IS pretty damn annoying not getting to see what the hell the enemy units are made up of and can do when you click one of them. At most, you see their unit name, portrait, and basic stats (attack, defense, speed), but you have no idea what they can do or what their animal makeup is unless you guess from their graphic or their nomenclature. This seems to be a design decision, though, as in the post-game statistical reports you can see all the units fielded by every player, and when you mouse over them their animal makeup, stats, and powers are shown. I suppose it makes sense not knowing every capability of what you're fighting until the match is over, and it could lend itself to some nice animal combination deception in a game.

[Jakub]

Try the Wolverine/Musk Ox combo. Deadly. :D

But yeah, the pre-made armies have better units since they don't rely on the crappy creatures you pick up on the frozen islands.

[balut]

A few more observations after some more play time with the demo.

Just recreated my army from the ground up. Cheap Skunk-Coyotes for level 1 scouting and harrasment (and stink cloud is good for escapes). I like using Herding/Pack creatures for levels 1-3 since they rely mostly on numbers for survival. I made level 2 Archerfish and Porcupine hybrids (Archer-Wolf and Porcupine-Wolf) as well as better, level 3 versions (Archer-Ox and Porcupine-Ox, respectively). That Musk Ox-Wolverine combo is just awesome. I called mine Frenzy Oxen - 18 melee damage through Horn attacks and Claws, massive HPs (~400 IIRC), and Herding ability. I made a pack of 10 of those, sent them out to fight, and frenzied them. I think they collectively killed about twice their numbers. My air corps consisted entirely of Snow Owl-Wolverine hybrids, called Frenzy Owls, and they served as nice air counterpoints to my Frenzy Oxen. I found that my Archer-Oxen (level 3 artillery units) were useful throughout the whole game, while the shorter-ranged Porcupine units weren't very effective.

Those Chameleon-hybrid units the CPU fields are brutal though; level 2 units with higher ranged damage than my strongest level 3 ranged unit. And those damned Killer Whale-Ox and Shark-Owl combos are pretty sick.

OTOH, I'm getting the hang of it, and I really do like the TA-style resource gathering. Combat doesn't seem _too_ counter-unit oriented because it's very hard to tell just what exactly the enemy is fielding. Instead, I find myself concentrating simply on making a balance of melee, artillery, and air or sea units and sending them out in as big a group as possible.

Disappointing that it seems to rely purely on numerical superiority in the demo, but I do find myself taking great pride in seeing my mad-scientist animal creations perform well on the battlefield.

[DennyA]

Well, crud. Looks like I'll have to buy PCG to check this baby out. (I let my sub lapse a few months ago.)

Good for the magazines. When I was EIC at Computer Games Mag it used to piss me off to no end when I'd spend all kinds of time securing a cool exclusive demo for our readers, only to find it ripped from the disc and on every major online site the day the mag hit newsstands. Glad the cost of bandwidth has put an end to that, at least.

[wumpus]

The "real" demo is out now:

http://www.microsoft.com/games/impossiblecreatures/downloads.asp

I played the multiplayer-only beta, and.. well, I'm not sure about this game.

[wumpus]

What if they released a game, and nobody cared? Impossible Creatures is the archetypal non-event.

[xahlt]

I'm not too big on RTS games, but I got it. I can't say I'm disliking it, but it's not doing a whole lot for me. The levels so far have been, ho-hum, I guess. And while I see how they were going for a slightly goofy pulp serial feel in the cutscenes, they didn't pull it off as well as say Crimson Skies.

Of course, the creature combiner is really 3/4 of the draw anyway. I have to give it strong credit in the area of helping you determine what animals might go well with which, and there is a very cool feature that will analyze your creature army "deck" of animals and give you pros/cons - and even suggest an attack/build-up strategy based off of what you have.

I guess that might be old news to the demo players, I didn't play it so I'm not sure how much was in it.

[Mark Asher]

It's going to be interesting to see who was right -- Sierra for taking a pass on Impossible Creatures or Microsoft for picking it up. I was enthused about the game seeing it at E3 two years ago, but the recent demo didn't generate much buzz. I want it to be more than a fun creature creator. I want the RTS gameplay to be first-rate too.

[Dave Long]

Kasavin called it "good" (http://gamespot.com/gamespot/filters/products/0,11114,914189,00.html).

--Dave

[Anonymous]

On its own merits, Impossible Creatures is certainly enjoyable and interesting, and it's worthwhile for the campaign alone, whose story will motivate you to slog through some fights that aren't always all that fun. In the end, you'll find yourself having a better time dreaming up and tweaking your custom armies than actually sending your creatures into the fray.

Bad. When the story is more "fun" than the gameplay, you might as well hang it up.

-wumpus

[Mark Asher]

This was the key paragraph from the review about the RTS battles:

"All this underscores the sense that the actual combat in Impossible Creatures just isn't very satisfying. Basically, your clump of weird units plows into the opponent's clump of weird units, and you cross your fingers and hope for the best. Even if you're running the game at a high resolution, often you can't readily tell what sorts of creatures you're up against, and while you can zoom in the camera perspective or click on an enemy creature to check its stats, there's no time for this sort of thing in a typical Impossible Creatures match. Perhaps it's understandable that the game doesn't allow you to organize your units into formations, given that they're all wild beasts. Still, what matters is you have very few real tactical options in commanding your forces, short of having to micromanage units with some marginally useful special abilities. So really, what's surprising about Impossible Creatures is that the brunt of the game's underlying strategy occurs before a match, in the army builder, rather than during one. There are no different factions to speak of in Impossible Creatures as there are in other games, so there's basically just one "right" way to most efficiently build up your base and get your resources piling in fast, and then it's just a matter of cranking out as many powerful units as possible."

He did say the single player campaign was the best part of the game. It doesn't sound like multiplayer will be very interesting.

[SpoofyChop]

This whole concept of wacky creatures battling it out just totally captures my imagination, beats it up, takes all it's money, and leaves it for dead in an alley somewhere in Redmond.

I have no interest in having a snake-tiger battle an armadillo-giraffe. I don't want a lion-horse to savage a rabbit-cougar. I also don't want to pay to see a horde of mouse-elephants scare themselves.

I don't really know what I want, but I do know that this isn't it. Sierra had the right idea taking a pass on this turkey-eel.

[Paxton]

i think the impossible creatures idea is more suited to a small scale tactical battle game, with a creature development meta-game. i wish they hadn't tried to rts it.

[Rob O'Boston]

This whole concept of wacky creatures battling it out just totally captures my imagination, beats it up, takes all it's money, and leaves it for dead in an alley somewhere in Redmond.

I have no interest in having a snake-tiger battle an armadillo-giraffe. I don't want a lion-horse to savage a rabbit-cougar. I also don't want to pay to see a horde of mouse-elephants scare themselves.

I don't really know what I want, but I do know that this isn't it. Sierra had the right idea taking a pass on this turkey-eel.

Congrats Spoofy, you just earned 'the most confusing post of the year' award. To sum up your post, I think you said: I love this, I hate this.

[Dave Long]

I also don't want to pay to see a horde of mouse-elephants scare themselves.

Now that's quotable!

--Dave

[Derek Smart [3000AD]]

This whole concept of wacky creatures battling it out just totally captures my imagination, beats it up, takes all it's money, and leaves it for dead in an alley somewhere in Redmond.

I have no interest in having a snake-tiger battle an armadillo-giraffe. I don't want a lion-horse to savage a rabbit-cougar. I also don't want to pay to see a horde of mouse-elephants scare themselves.

I don't really know what I want, but I do know that this isn't it. Sierra had the right idea taking a pass on this turkey-eel.

LMAO!!! damn that was funny.

/me snipping content for a new sig

[SpoofyChop]

This whole concept of wacky creatures battling it out just totally captures my imagination, beats it up, takes all it's money, and leaves it for dead in an alley somewhere in Redmond.

I have no interest in having a snake-tiger battle an armadillo-giraffe. I don't want a lion-horse to savage a rabbit-cougar. I also don't want to pay to see a horde of mouse-elephants scare themselves.

I don't really know what I want, but I do know that this isn't it. Sierra had the right idea taking a pass on this turkey-eel.

Congrats Spoofy, you just earned 'the most confusing post of the year' award. To sum up your post, I think you said: I love this, I hate this.

Hmm...so early in the year too.

What I was trying to say was this:

Nobody in his wrong mind won't not certainly want to have been prevented from ceasing to play this game! I can't have been unable to forget to have imagined a single person who doesn't want to have not stopped playing this for a single second! There are no words to describe how enjoyable this title won't have been once nobody who didn't play it remembers to write their comments on forums such as this one isn't!

Does that clear it up at all?

I repeat: turkey-eel.

[Rob O'Boston]

Crystal.

Can I make a turkEel?

[mtkafka]

This was the key paragraph from the review about the RTS battles:

"All this underscores the sense that the actual combat in Impossible Creatures just isn't very satisfying. Basically, your clump of weird units plows into the opponent's clump of weird units, and you cross your fingers and hope for the best. Even if you're running the game at a high resolution, often you can't readily tell what sorts of creatures you're up against, and while you can zoom in the camera perspective or click on an enemy creature to check its stats, there's no time for this sort of thing in a typical Impossible Creatures match. Perhaps it's understandable that the game doesn't allow you to organize your units into formations, given that they're all wild beasts. Still, what matters is you have very few real tactical options in commanding your forces, short of having to micromanage units with some marginally useful special abilities. So really, what's surprising about Impossible Creatures is that the brunt of the game's underlying strategy occurs before a match, in the army builder, rather than during one. There are no different factions to speak of in Impossible Creatures as there are in other games, so there's basically just one "right" way to most efficiently build up your base and get your resources piling in fast, and then it's just a matter of cranking out as many powerful units as possible."

He did say the single player campaign was the best part of the game. It doesn't sound like multiplayer will be very interesting.

Isnt this review just saying its like any other rts? And the 'marginally' useful special abilities... huh? There's like a ton of different abilities from camouflage, digging, exploding (armadillo abiity), herding, pack hunting, plague attacks, leap attacks, ... all of this I've seen in different animals being used more than just marginally. I think the inability to not recognize creatures is as mucha probem in any other rts, you just have to get used to the units. SO far I'd say IC is as controllable in tactical battles as AoM, and a little less than War 3... though at LEAST in IC you can see the health on your army on the bottom left AND can have more than 10 units as well. I think its a much better game than AoM and War 3 because it DOES have that 'metagame' of preparinga 'creature deck ala magic' before battles. The build an army gameplay is done very well. And so far, it seems pretty balanced (based on one nights play).

etc

[Mark Asher]

I dunno -- most units in RTS games are easy to recognize. TA was tough because of the sheer number of units, but basic units everyone knew.

For IC to really work, I'd think you'd have to have the enjoyment of recognizing enemy units and countering with the proper elements of your own horde rather than just amassing a bunch of weird creatures and tossing them at another mass of weird creatures.

For example, if I see giraffe neck on a gazelle body, I should know it's a scout unit that's fast but weak, so I send my flying spider at it to web it to the ground so my slower infantry unit can catch it and kill it. When I see a creature with a gorilla body with the badger head, I know it's an infantry type that can crush, pummel, and bite, so I counter with my own hardshelled infantry unit that's resistent to crushing and biting. If I have trouble just recognizing the creatures because they're small and difficult to see, though, I don't get to make these decisions.

At some level all harvest/build/attack RTS games are about cranking out an army and flinging it at the enemy, so IC doesn't seem different in this regard. The RTS games where you feel like you're making strategic builds and tactical attacks seem more rewarding.