The Impossible Missions of Impossible Mission.

     Impossible Mission is the type of game that requires amazing puzzle-solving skills, fast hand-eye coordination and just a great understanding of what the heck you're supposed to do in this game. In my time playing, I played through the game 4 times each time getting further and further before ultimately losing. At the start of the game, there is a robotic voice giving one of those classic "you're doomed" kinds of messages and then nothing. Just complete silence, there's no kind of 8-bit music playing, or any sort of instruction as to how to play. They basically just throw in with nothing.

  

 Now the actual gameplay mechanics are quite interesting, you have one speed of running, which makes sense for the era of the game, you also have a very nicely animated front flip that acts as our jump and that's pretty much it. It's nothing too fancy but it works really well for the game itself. 

The one thing that got me utterly confused was the puzzles. At first, I thought the puzzle was like a kind of Simon game, where you just repeat a sequence, but every time I would do it it wouldn't work. It almost seemed like it would either solve itself or just stay unsolved. Not the worst puzzle in a video game from the 80's but definitely not the best either. 

    

The most notable parts of this game are what I can only describe as the most rage-inducing levels I have ever played in an '80s game, and I've played asteroids before. The levels are a sort of platforming style of gameplay, with bottomless pits, and killer robots, and some levels even feature what I like to call "The bowling ball of death" which is just a black ball that kills you if you touch it, standard video game rules.  Now the number of times I died at these levels is astronomical, I

probably spent more time dying than actually figuring out what I was supposed to be doing. During my gameplay, I would repeatedly die to enemies by just having the tip of my foot clip them during a jump, or accidentally jumping into them from another platform. Not because of the difficulty of the game, which is actually very easy to get the hang of after about ten minutes, but because of my poor calculations and just my overall urge to speed run every level and not pay attention to avoid enemies.

    

My overall experience with the game was surprisingly fun, I would Solve more and more puzzles each run and get faster at handling controls, and that only made my entire experience of trying to beat the game more and more, just made playing worth every second of it. Giving an overall rating to this game, I would give it a 4 out of 5. The lack of story or instructions is a minor flaw in the overall feel and style of the game. The remastered version of Impossible Mission is currently available to purchase on Steam for $2.50 CAD, $1.99 USD or £1.69 UK. You can click here if you're interested in checking it out. If you're the type of person who's interested in games with challenges and infuriating difficulty, then Impossible Mission is one mission that might not be as impossible after all.