Impossible Mission II

The Good
Epyx had Hungarian Novotrade create a much bigger sequel based on Dennis Caswell's original concept. Elvin Atombender is back with a new tower complex more furnished than the last and some new models of robot protecting it. The tower has a more fixed map, not quite the Roguelike map-making of the first game; there are eight subtowers each with its own furnishing theme starting with the gym tower and ending with the storage, but you'll be placed randomly in one of the towers to start the mission and progress through them in order. The towers are arranged in a ring so when you progress rightward from tower eight you come to tower one. Each tower has a fixed set of rooms but their vertical order changes with each game, also the number rooms per tower changes i.e max six rooms per tower, but sometimes you're lucky and there are only four.

So the graphics are advanced, clearly the game was made for newer computers like the Atari ST, Amiga and Apple II-GS, as the Commodore 64 version struggles with the greater depth. The Amiga and other new ones have a cool title theme by Chris Grigg (Maniac Mansion, California Games, Zak McKracken). There's a lot of large, impressive looking new furniture e.g. vintage cars, machinery and futuristic weapons.

The game may well be harder than the first, rooms crowded with the standard sentrybots of the first game plus the new bashbots, pestbots, minebots etc. and sideways lifts as well as up/down, except that you can save your game this time around and make things a LOT easier e.g. save the game at the start of each tower, figure out the door combination and the strategy required to get the music from the safe (if it's a copy of a music you already have you needn't bother) then load the saved game and do the tower again knowing where the correct code numbers are and other useful tools and how best to get to the safe and save the time you waste on false codes, searches that turn up nothing and time penalties from dying. Doing it this way you can complete the game with hours to spare. I suppose if the first game had saving it may have been too easy so I can sympathize with Dennis Caswell not having it despite there being a bit of a call for it.

I think IM2 is better but not by a lot, considering the extra work done on the game. The rooms are more fun to watch, they're so animated and the use of explosives makes it seem more spy-like. There is probably more puzzle-solving, you have to blow holes in the floor sometimes to get to a safe or potential code or to escape through the floor when trapped. I enjoy splicing together the pieces of music, it's obviously less challenging than matching slides to uncover a password, except you have to be careful about accidentally overdubbing previous music, that can quite easily happen.

The Bad
That brings me to perhaps the part I hate most. So you get your first 25 second music piece, rewind the tape to listen to it but stop the tape at 24 seconds in rather than 25. The next music you get will be placed on the 0-25 segment, erasing your previous music and quite possibly costing you the game (one of the two duplicate musics might be a copy of the erased music).

Obviously the game allows a lot of failure when navigating the rooms but I think there's usually a way to search the room and get out with your life. There's one music safe (tower eight I think) that you can get to by blowing a hole in the floor, but once you've got the music there doesn't seem to be a way back out. Dunno if it's a design fault or if you're just expected the die on purpose to escape (certainly there is a suicide key, thoughtfully provided). Would like to know if there is in fact a way out involving the sideways moving platform below the floor.

The Bottom Line
I got this game at Christmas 1990, a special Epyx 3-pack (DOS versions), and was just starting to understand, appreciate and enjoy the game when it wouldn't load from floppy anymore (no backup) with imii.exe. I tried to fix the disk (not having a clue what I was doing) and ended up erasing it. For a long time I looked for another copy of the game but it proved elusive. Then a couple of months ago I checked Steam on a whim and some decent people have acquired the rights and re-released the game (DOS version) at a fair price. At the same time, Antstream has both the DOS and Amiga versions in their library. I'd highly recommend both versions, preferably Amiga for the superior music and sound, but the DOS is graphically the same and seems to run a bit faster than the Amiga. I think both Impossible Mission and its advanced sequel are almost equally good and real high points in game history.