Mission: Impossible

The Good
Okay, I admit it: It's probably one of the lamest things to do - writing about a game you've worked on. But since nobody else seems to be inclined to do it, I'm gonna go for it anyways. Sue me. I'll try to be as objective as possible.

So what's good about it? Well, the game does follow the movie's storyline to some extend - you'll recognize many key scenes. The individual levels are also very versatile in their gameplay - you have rather quiet levels (the first few) where you can get around without enemy contact if you maintain a low profile, you have levels where you can't even shoot at all (embassy levels), and then there's pure action levels (in the train, and on the gunboat)... and the train station sniper level.

The Bad
LOTS, admittedly. For one thing, ingame speech sucks. The English speakers fall asleep when they're talking. Infogrames chose to hire a British studio for the English recordings, and although I was told they were using an American for Ethan Hunt himself, he still sounds more like James Bond (Bond on sleeping pills, that is).

And the German speakers - well, I had the pleasure of being there when they were being recorded, and I knew right at that point that German mags would give us hell for the ridiculous recording. They did. (Although some voice talents were excellent).

The gameplay... at some points, the graphics are just too jerky, especially in the train levels. This obviously has a rather negative effect on the responsiveness.

The sound effects suck too - most of them were taken straight from the Nintendo 64, so they have a pitiful bitrate and just sound dull. (In some levels however, we've added some funny extra sound effects - try jumping out of the window or get run over by the train!).

The levels itself are pretty linear. Most of the time, you have to do what's next on your list, pretty little freedom there. We often wanted to soup up the levels, but due to time constraints, we pretty much had to stick to the original N64 game logic scripts.

The Bottom Line
All in all, I like the game. It has its flaws, and truly, it is no Metal Gear Solid, but it's still a nice spy game. And it is definitely a vast improvement over the Nintendo 64 version - most importantly, the QuickSave function that lets you save at any time in the game makes THE difference in gameplay since it takes out all the frustration of playing the big levels again and again, which was one of the main critical points of the N64 version.

The CD sound and digitized speech - yes, the speech sucks, but at least there IS speech which helps the game a lot, and the music is really good.

Besides, there are many little extra details and new special effects. Just tiny little things that'll make you go "hey, nice!"; especially when you've seen the N64 version before that.

So once you've finished Metal Gear Solid and Syphon Filter, here's another spy game that's going to keep you busy for a while.