Nukezilla Review: The Impossible Game (iPhone)

With a name like The Impossible Game, the icon for FlukeDude‘s odd little title took its place on my iPhone’s home screen with some pretty high expectations to live up to. Any developer who has the balls to put the word “impossible” in his game’s title needs to be extremely confident in the software’s level of difficulty. That is, the game needs to be bloody hard.

Fortunately, this is one area where The Impossible Game does not disappoint. It is, indeed, extremely difficult. The object of the game is to tap the screen at appropriate times to make a small orange square jump over obstacles. If this evokes memories of the runaway (get it) hit Canabalt, then you’re imagining this game the same way I did when I read the instructions. Good. Now, forget about Canabalt, because The Impossible Game is nothing like it. The two games share the “one button to jump, avoid obstacles” gameplay that seems to be gaining popularity in iPhone games, but that’s about it.

The Impossible Game is very fast-paced. One split-second mistake and you’re fried. That’s not too bad though, because the entire game takes about two minutes to complete ‘” if you can make it that far. Every time you fail, the game immediately pops you back to the beginning and keeps on rolling. The complete inability to choose whether you want to continue or quit creates an ever-building sense of frustration, which often ends in the iPhone’s home button being smashed repeatedly.

The player is not required to play through the entire game in one sitting without any assistance, however. There’s a small button at the bottom of the screen which will allow you to place a flag on the course. If you die, you restart at the last point you placed a flag. When I first sat down with this game, I finished it with the help of flags in about ten minutes. The game congratulated me for finishing, then promptly called me a little bitch (I may be embellishing) for using flags. Apparently, if I were a real man I’d have finished the game without using any flags ‘” finishing the whole course in one sitting, with no mistakes. My goal was clear.

About a week later, here we are. I finally finished without the aid of the demoralizing little bastards, but not before developing a severely-bipolar attitude toward the game. The Impossible Game does a lot of things right, but the two main complaints I have with it are relatively major.

First, the graphics are very simple. In many cases this is a good thing, but they’re just a bit too rudimentary here. The background of the game is a teal-to-black gradient. The playfield is a horizontal line. Your character is an orange square with a two-point black outline. The flags honestly look like they were designed in thirty seconds in MS Paint. If it weren’t for the fact that the game’s protagonist (if it can even be called that) rotates when it jumps, I’d have likely written the game off based on the visuals (or lack thereof) alone. I know it’s a shallow thing to say, but these things matter. It’s not that the game is ugly, but from a visual standpoint it just needs to be livened up a bit.

Next, and more importantly, the music doesn’t sync with the gameplay. The description of the game in the iPhone’s App Store claims: “With an awesome soundtrack synced to the game you’ll quickly become addicted!” The music in The Impossible Game is a generic-sounding techno track cut to fit the length of the game’s single course. Quality aside, the only way it can be said that the music is “synced to the game” is if you count the fact that every once in a while when you jump on a block it’ll be in time with the music’s bass track. As a rhythm game aficionado ‘” and having gone into this game expecting it to behave similarly to one ‘” the lack of congruency between the gameplay and music is a massive disappointment. In fact, I found it far easier to finish the game with my iPhone muted. Playing The Impossible Game with the music on is like playing Rock Band with the notes mapped incorrectly. It feels like you should hit now, but you really should have hit half a second ago. In my eyes, it’s nearly a deal-breaker.

Thankfully, the competent level design and consistent, reliable controls (control?) make this an entertaining distraction, especially at the going rate of $0.99. If you’ve got a problem paying a dollar for a game that will likely keep you entertained for at least an hour or so, you need to stop being so picky. I’ve wasted more on less.

(What does this score mean?)

Disclosure: FlukeDude was kind enough to provide us with a code to download the game at no cost, so thanks very much for that. I’d still pay a dollar for it, though.