Impossible Creatures: Campaign
I already did a post about the storytelling of Impossible Creatures, but the campaign design merits some related-but-fairly-separate scrutiny as well.
For starters, the campaign has two units exclusive to it: Rex and Lucy themselves.
Lucy is the more straightforward of the two, because she doesn't change much. At the beginning of the game, she acts as a worker unit (Harvests Coal, builds buildings, repairs buildings), as you don't actually get Henchmen until partway through the second mission. She never loses this set of capabilities, either, and I personally tend to have her handle building construction as a result. She also acts as the campaign's justification for unlocking buildings -you have her study a new enemy building, and now you have access to it- and early in the campaign she gains a 'sabotage' ability that causes massive damage to a targeted building over time, which is Lucy's offensive capability. Additionally, she and Rex are initially unable to swim, but gain that capability once the game starts seriously expecting the player to build aquatic/amphibious creatures. (Oddly, Henchmen are able to swim right away. It's particularly jarring because the 'can't swim' portion of the campaign is also the 'islands covered in snow and ice where the water is presumably freezing' portion)
While I compared her to a worker unit, as the campaign progresses it's increasingly the case that Lucy doesn't get Henchmen capabilities. You can upgrade the ability for Henchmen to tag enemy creatures for permanent line of sight: Lucy does not benefit from this upgrade. You can upgrade Henchmen to be able to manually heal your units: Lucy does not benefit from this upgrade. You eventually gain access to a Helipad with a Gyrocopter, which a single Henchmen can fly around in to give you a flying worker that can also transport a single unit at a time: Lucy cannot operate the Gyrocopter. (And, oddly enough, Lucy and Rex also can't be picked up by the Gyrocopter, though there's only one mission where this is bothersome) As far as I'm aware, the only Henchmen upgrade she does benefit from is the one that increases their Coal carrying capacity by 50%.
The overall result is that at the very beginning of the campaign, Lucy acts as your all-purpose worker unit, then you get Henchmen to handle a good chunk of those duties and Lucy becomes a bit more focused in her utility there and her sabotage ability becomes a lot more relevant. It takes a surprisingly long time for Lucy to cease to be your primary building destruction tool -endgame creatures are better than her, but before that? Lucy is usually faster. Her 800 HP is also plenty to let her run into the middle of fighting and sabotage a building.
Which leads into: her and Rex can also both be loaded into your HQ. The obvious utility is protecting them, and it's a good utility given that if either of them dies you instantly lose the mission, but a secondary utility is that they're rapidly healed while inside the HQ. This is important, since they don't regenerate HP normally and it takes a surprisingly long period of time for the campaign to grant you Henchmen-based healing; if it weren't for the HQ-loading effect, every hit point Lucy lost would be permanent for a good chunk of the campaign.
Eventually Lucy becomes vulnerable enough relative to the climbing power of enemy units you shouldn't be using her for sabotage and whatnot, but right around the point this is getting unavoidably true is also the point at which the campaign takes her away from you as a unit.
Rex doesn't benefit from such a decision.
So. Rex. He's a lot more significant to cover because his handling in gameplay is tied directly to his handling in the plot, and the execution is... iffy. At the beginning of the game, he's apparently a perfectly normal human being whose only connection to events is that his father was involved in weird science. The fact that he has 1000 HP when units at the beginning of the game rarely go above double-digit is pretty clearly gameplay and story segregation, so whatever. As the game progresses, though, the story increasingly emphasizes that Rex is actually a superhuman/inhuman monstrosity for whom sleep is optional, wounds heal before your eyes, and even the most out-of-control of creatures readily bow to his will 'cause Science, and the gameplay attempts to reflect this by having Rex gain new traits as you progress.
In actuality, though, Rex has his quality spike when he gains the ability to shoot enemy creatures, with it all being downhill from there aside a brief boost up when he picks up passive regeneration.
His HP doesn't rise: 1000 HP is monstrous at the beginning of the campaign. In the final mission, it's so low that you can have him die from a single mid-sized attack wave while you're in the middle of reacting to the game letting you know Rex is under attack. His damage doesn't rise, either; he does something like 250 damage, which initially is a one-hit-kill on literally everything you'll encounter, but eventually is less than half the health of units the AI is spamming.
His special abilities, meanwhile, are... uneven.
Keen Senses basically just ends up interfering with the campaign acting as any kind of gateway to how multiplayer works. Early in the campaign, before Rex has Keen Senses, the AI more or less doesn't use stealth and burrowing effects. Later on, when they start showing up semi-consistently, Rex means the player doesn't have to bother designing a Keen Senses unit. (Even aside that the AI is hyper-aggressive and so will just reveal its cloaked forces by attacking anyway)
Regeneration is actually pretty decent -Rex's regeneration is much faster than the regeneration on regular units (Where you even have regular units regenerating), and so even though he has 1000 Hp he'll get back to it from even serious damage in a fairly timely manner. No longer needing to duck back to the lab periodically if you're using him as a meatshield (Which he's really good at for more than half the campaign) is a pretty big boost in his utility.
'Pack Hunter' is semi-notable, turning Rex into a passive damage boost for your army. It's actually well-timed, too, in that it shows up when enemy damage has gotten to the point that meatshielding with Rex is courting an instant game over; now you can put him behind your army instead of in front, and he's still contributing. I suspect this effect doesn't stack with the actual Pack Hunter creature trait, which if true would mean its utility depends in part on what creature designs you're using -if you're using Pack Hunter creatures as your mainstays, it's not helping. Regardless, my primary complaint is that the boost is small; like I said, it's well-timed as far as Rex's shifting role. My secondary complaint is how it actually highlights that Rex isn't as superhuman as we're meant to see him as, since you end up using him more as a 'leadership' unit than a super-awesome super-unit.
Poison Touch (Poisons units that melee attack Rex) is basically worthless. In theory Poison Touch should let Rex defeat the early trash mob units the enemy sends at you by facetanking, not even having to bother firing his gun. In practice, the instant you have Poison Touch on Rex the AI's trash mob units are suddenly uniformly builds that include Immunity. All Poison Touch does in real terms is occasionally help Rex escape from a bad situation. (Poison slows down units in Impossible Creatures, in addition to doing damage) It's so irrelevant I tend to forget he gets it.
And... other than gaining neurotoxin darts ie his basic attacking action -which, by the way, is blamed on looting some ammo, not on Rex, like, sweating a deadly neurotoxin he's coating his darts in- that's his whole list of special abilities.
So when you're in the part of the game where the plot is trying to emphasize Rex's superhuman nature, that's the point he's stopped being one of your best and most useful units. He doesn't even feel all that more superhuman than Lucy -the main quality that makes him more useful than her is that he has a gun. Seriously.
Also, you might've noticed I glossed over this whole 'Rex is supethuman' thing when talking about the plot. That would be because it's not actually that important to the plot. The plot kinda... tries to play it up... but mostly it ends up serving as an ongoing justification for why Julius wants Rex captured alive, which has the issue that Rex is so busy stomping all his forces effortlessly that there's never a situation where Rex being wanted alive matters. Maybe the very opening cinema? That's... the only part of the story I could buy it being relevant to.
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The actual mission design in Impossible Creatures is mostly pretty... blandly competent. There's a couple of missions with tortuously bad design, which given the campaign is 15 missions long isn't too bad, but most missions can be boiled down to 'beat up the enemies and collect DNA samples, the latter being optional'. Enemy force composition isn't worth paying attention to, your own force composition has little reason to change -if you default to land-only designs there's a few cases you'll need to break out amphibious designs or something, but that's about it- and you almost never operate on interesting constraints. (The primary exception being one of the two tortuously bad missions; the second-to-last mission is dumb) Attempts to introduce some variety don't tend to work very well; the mission that introduces artillery units involves you using your artillery units to put out fires at the beginning of the mission, and then past that who cares?
Ultimately, the campaign ends up showing off that the developers are only half-aware of how their own mechanics work. You've got most of the important animals for unit design from really early on, with the only important stuff you're missing being bigger animals so you can make your existing designs even bigger and thus stronger/higher-tech-level, but the game keeps throwing new animals at you anyway, clearly expecting you to care about these new, largely-irrelevant options. Even though the game will tell you that its core rock/paper/scissors concept is that artillery beats ranged beats melee beats artillery, it takes several missions for the game to get around to providing you even a single artillery option; even aside that the game's rock/paper/scissors concept doesn't work in practice, if you accept that premise as true than the player should just spam ranged units all the time until artillery enters the campaign... and you've only got one ranged animal for quite some time, so there's no variety there.
Oh, by the way, you should spam ranged units all the time, and this only gets more true as you rise in tech level. Artillery showing up doesn't actually change that point, it just means your ranged units can include artillery now.
The whole thing is kinda disappointing. Homeworld's missions each had some concept to make them memorable. Several of them ended up pretty boring/terrible in practice -I still want the two hours of my life back from navigating through the asteroids in the super-deadly-sun mission- but they all had some kind of 'hook' to set them apart from each other. Impossible Creatures mostly ends up leaning on changing out the face of your villainous taunting periodically, and given they're not even all that distinct from each other and don't talk during actual gameplay that doesn't do a lot to distinguish them. I'm writing this particular paragraph having marathoned the campaign over three days, the last of which was two days ago, and I'm already struggling to remember individual missions, with what I can remember being weighted toward 'I hated X aspect of Y mission'. (The volcano mission where you need to use a Gyrocopter to set up infrastructure on the other side of the map while the AI is perfectly able to walk ground troops through a cave is infuriating...)
Missions also tend to drag. Missions that really ought to take half an hour drag on for a full hour, mostly because you're fighting against the tide of constant creature spawns. I know for a fact the AI cheats on resources to at least the extent of starting missions with huge stockpiles of Coal, so there's no point at which this stuff stops, especially because the AI usually starts out with a huge supply of Coal in their main base and control over multiple other Coal sites. You end up with such huge supplies of Coal yourself that even if you get multiple waves of attacks killed (Improbable, unless you're committed to using bad designs because, I dunno, they look cool or something) you're never really in danger of losing a mission by running out of steam. The final mission was the only time I ever found myself wondering if I was going to run out of Coal before I managed to beat the mission; in most missions I was ending with over 30,000 Coal in the bank, in missions where my expensive creatures were maybe 250 Coal.
I note this dragging point because the campaign is short in mission count, but it doesn't feel short, and not in the good way where you get to the end and you're satisfied, but in the bad way of wondering when you'll be done with this.
Unfortunately, while the campaign is weak, part of why is what I mentioned earlier of half-understanding their own mechanics...
For starters, the campaign has two units exclusive to it: Rex and Lucy themselves.
Lucy is the more straightforward of the two, because she doesn't change much. At the beginning of the game, she acts as a worker unit (Harvests Coal, builds buildings, repairs buildings), as you don't actually get Henchmen until partway through the second mission. She never loses this set of capabilities, either, and I personally tend to have her handle building construction as a result. She also acts as the campaign's justification for unlocking buildings -you have her study a new enemy building, and now you have access to it- and early in the campaign she gains a 'sabotage' ability that causes massive damage to a targeted building over time, which is Lucy's offensive capability. Additionally, she and Rex are initially unable to swim, but gain that capability once the game starts seriously expecting the player to build aquatic/amphibious creatures. (Oddly, Henchmen are able to swim right away. It's particularly jarring because the 'can't swim' portion of the campaign is also the 'islands covered in snow and ice where the water is presumably freezing' portion)
While I compared her to a worker unit, as the campaign progresses it's increasingly the case that Lucy doesn't get Henchmen capabilities. You can upgrade the ability for Henchmen to tag enemy creatures for permanent line of sight: Lucy does not benefit from this upgrade. You can upgrade Henchmen to be able to manually heal your units: Lucy does not benefit from this upgrade. You eventually gain access to a Helipad with a Gyrocopter, which a single Henchmen can fly around in to give you a flying worker that can also transport a single unit at a time: Lucy cannot operate the Gyrocopter. (And, oddly enough, Lucy and Rex also can't be picked up by the Gyrocopter, though there's only one mission where this is bothersome) As far as I'm aware, the only Henchmen upgrade she does benefit from is the one that increases their Coal carrying capacity by 50%.
The overall result is that at the very beginning of the campaign, Lucy acts as your all-purpose worker unit, then you get Henchmen to handle a good chunk of those duties and Lucy becomes a bit more focused in her utility there and her sabotage ability becomes a lot more relevant. It takes a surprisingly long time for Lucy to cease to be your primary building destruction tool -endgame creatures are better than her, but before that? Lucy is usually faster. Her 800 HP is also plenty to let her run into the middle of fighting and sabotage a building.
Which leads into: her and Rex can also both be loaded into your HQ. The obvious utility is protecting them, and it's a good utility given that if either of them dies you instantly lose the mission, but a secondary utility is that they're rapidly healed while inside the HQ. This is important, since they don't regenerate HP normally and it takes a surprisingly long period of time for the campaign to grant you Henchmen-based healing; if it weren't for the HQ-loading effect, every hit point Lucy lost would be permanent for a good chunk of the campaign.
Eventually Lucy becomes vulnerable enough relative to the climbing power of enemy units you shouldn't be using her for sabotage and whatnot, but right around the point this is getting unavoidably true is also the point at which the campaign takes her away from you as a unit.
Rex doesn't benefit from such a decision.
So. Rex. He's a lot more significant to cover because his handling in gameplay is tied directly to his handling in the plot, and the execution is... iffy. At the beginning of the game, he's apparently a perfectly normal human being whose only connection to events is that his father was involved in weird science. The fact that he has 1000 HP when units at the beginning of the game rarely go above double-digit is pretty clearly gameplay and story segregation, so whatever. As the game progresses, though, the story increasingly emphasizes that Rex is actually a superhuman/inhuman monstrosity for whom sleep is optional, wounds heal before your eyes, and even the most out-of-control of creatures readily bow to his will 'cause Science, and the gameplay attempts to reflect this by having Rex gain new traits as you progress.
In actuality, though, Rex has his quality spike when he gains the ability to shoot enemy creatures, with it all being downhill from there aside a brief boost up when he picks up passive regeneration.
His HP doesn't rise: 1000 HP is monstrous at the beginning of the campaign. In the final mission, it's so low that you can have him die from a single mid-sized attack wave while you're in the middle of reacting to the game letting you know Rex is under attack. His damage doesn't rise, either; he does something like 250 damage, which initially is a one-hit-kill on literally everything you'll encounter, but eventually is less than half the health of units the AI is spamming.
His special abilities, meanwhile, are... uneven.
Keen Senses basically just ends up interfering with the campaign acting as any kind of gateway to how multiplayer works. Early in the campaign, before Rex has Keen Senses, the AI more or less doesn't use stealth and burrowing effects. Later on, when they start showing up semi-consistently, Rex means the player doesn't have to bother designing a Keen Senses unit. (Even aside that the AI is hyper-aggressive and so will just reveal its cloaked forces by attacking anyway)
Regeneration is actually pretty decent -Rex's regeneration is much faster than the regeneration on regular units (Where you even have regular units regenerating), and so even though he has 1000 Hp he'll get back to it from even serious damage in a fairly timely manner. No longer needing to duck back to the lab periodically if you're using him as a meatshield (Which he's really good at for more than half the campaign) is a pretty big boost in his utility.
'Pack Hunter' is semi-notable, turning Rex into a passive damage boost for your army. It's actually well-timed, too, in that it shows up when enemy damage has gotten to the point that meatshielding with Rex is courting an instant game over; now you can put him behind your army instead of in front, and he's still contributing. I suspect this effect doesn't stack with the actual Pack Hunter creature trait, which if true would mean its utility depends in part on what creature designs you're using -if you're using Pack Hunter creatures as your mainstays, it's not helping. Regardless, my primary complaint is that the boost is small; like I said, it's well-timed as far as Rex's shifting role. My secondary complaint is how it actually highlights that Rex isn't as superhuman as we're meant to see him as, since you end up using him more as a 'leadership' unit than a super-awesome super-unit.
Poison Touch (Poisons units that melee attack Rex) is basically worthless. In theory Poison Touch should let Rex defeat the early trash mob units the enemy sends at you by facetanking, not even having to bother firing his gun. In practice, the instant you have Poison Touch on Rex the AI's trash mob units are suddenly uniformly builds that include Immunity. All Poison Touch does in real terms is occasionally help Rex escape from a bad situation. (Poison slows down units in Impossible Creatures, in addition to doing damage) It's so irrelevant I tend to forget he gets it.
And... other than gaining neurotoxin darts ie his basic attacking action -which, by the way, is blamed on looting some ammo, not on Rex, like, sweating a deadly neurotoxin he's coating his darts in- that's his whole list of special abilities.
So when you're in the part of the game where the plot is trying to emphasize Rex's superhuman nature, that's the point he's stopped being one of your best and most useful units. He doesn't even feel all that more superhuman than Lucy -the main quality that makes him more useful than her is that he has a gun. Seriously.
Also, you might've noticed I glossed over this whole 'Rex is supethuman' thing when talking about the plot. That would be because it's not actually that important to the plot. The plot kinda... tries to play it up... but mostly it ends up serving as an ongoing justification for why Julius wants Rex captured alive, which has the issue that Rex is so busy stomping all his forces effortlessly that there's never a situation where Rex being wanted alive matters. Maybe the very opening cinema? That's... the only part of the story I could buy it being relevant to.
------------------------------
The actual mission design in Impossible Creatures is mostly pretty... blandly competent. There's a couple of missions with tortuously bad design, which given the campaign is 15 missions long isn't too bad, but most missions can be boiled down to 'beat up the enemies and collect DNA samples, the latter being optional'. Enemy force composition isn't worth paying attention to, your own force composition has little reason to change -if you default to land-only designs there's a few cases you'll need to break out amphibious designs or something, but that's about it- and you almost never operate on interesting constraints. (The primary exception being one of the two tortuously bad missions; the second-to-last mission is dumb) Attempts to introduce some variety don't tend to work very well; the mission that introduces artillery units involves you using your artillery units to put out fires at the beginning of the mission, and then past that who cares?
Ultimately, the campaign ends up showing off that the developers are only half-aware of how their own mechanics work. You've got most of the important animals for unit design from really early on, with the only important stuff you're missing being bigger animals so you can make your existing designs even bigger and thus stronger/higher-tech-level, but the game keeps throwing new animals at you anyway, clearly expecting you to care about these new, largely-irrelevant options. Even though the game will tell you that its core rock/paper/scissors concept is that artillery beats ranged beats melee beats artillery, it takes several missions for the game to get around to providing you even a single artillery option; even aside that the game's rock/paper/scissors concept doesn't work in practice, if you accept that premise as true than the player should just spam ranged units all the time until artillery enters the campaign... and you've only got one ranged animal for quite some time, so there's no variety there.
Oh, by the way, you should spam ranged units all the time, and this only gets more true as you rise in tech level. Artillery showing up doesn't actually change that point, it just means your ranged units can include artillery now.
The whole thing is kinda disappointing. Homeworld's missions each had some concept to make them memorable. Several of them ended up pretty boring/terrible in practice -I still want the two hours of my life back from navigating through the asteroids in the super-deadly-sun mission- but they all had some kind of 'hook' to set them apart from each other. Impossible Creatures mostly ends up leaning on changing out the face of your villainous taunting periodically, and given they're not even all that distinct from each other and don't talk during actual gameplay that doesn't do a lot to distinguish them. I'm writing this particular paragraph having marathoned the campaign over three days, the last of which was two days ago, and I'm already struggling to remember individual missions, with what I can remember being weighted toward 'I hated X aspect of Y mission'. (The volcano mission where you need to use a Gyrocopter to set up infrastructure on the other side of the map while the AI is perfectly able to walk ground troops through a cave is infuriating...)
Missions also tend to drag. Missions that really ought to take half an hour drag on for a full hour, mostly because you're fighting against the tide of constant creature spawns. I know for a fact the AI cheats on resources to at least the extent of starting missions with huge stockpiles of Coal, so there's no point at which this stuff stops, especially because the AI usually starts out with a huge supply of Coal in their main base and control over multiple other Coal sites. You end up with such huge supplies of Coal yourself that even if you get multiple waves of attacks killed (Improbable, unless you're committed to using bad designs because, I dunno, they look cool or something) you're never really in danger of losing a mission by running out of steam. The final mission was the only time I ever found myself wondering if I was going to run out of Coal before I managed to beat the mission; in most missions I was ending with over 30,000 Coal in the bank, in missions where my expensive creatures were maybe 250 Coal.
I note this dragging point because the campaign is short in mission count, but it doesn't feel short, and not in the good way where you get to the end and you're satisfied, but in the bad way of wondering when you'll be done with this.
Unfortunately, while the campaign is weak, part of why is what I mentioned earlier of half-understanding their own mechanics...
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