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Impossible Creatures is the upcoming 3D real-time strategy game where animals are your genetic playthings.

The story follows the adventures of Rex Chance, who is searching for his missing father. While looking in his father’s abandoned laboratory, Rex is confronted by a disgusting creature that has the head of a wolf and the body of a giant scorpion. After narrowly escaping a deadly attack, Rex finds himself surrounded by a group of these creatures outside the lab. At this point, a man named Upton Julius approaches. After a brief conversation, Rex finds out that this man has kidnapped his father and wishes to dispose of Rex as well.

Just as Julius sends his creatures after Rex, a strange woman riding in a flying train appears, shoots down a few of the creatures with tranquilizers, and allows Rex to escape with her. Unfortunately, her sky train is damaged and she must land on a nearby island for repairs. At this point, you find out this woman is Lucy Willing and that she is also looking for Rex’s father. She also fills you in on why such “impossible creatures” now exist since she and Rex’s father worked on the same genetic project that made this technological marvel possible. And this is where the gameplay begins.

The beta version I played came with a very thorough tutorial, three skirmish modes, multiplayer, and four single player levels from the game, complete with cut-scenes, dialogue, and in-game cinematics. From what I’ve seen so far, the game is nicely polished and has a unique style while still maintaining standards from the real-time strategy genre.

The main focus of the game is to be able to create your own units (i.e. creatures) to create an army with. On each island, which act as the levels in the game, there are a handful of animals roaming around, such as wolves, bears, lions, etc. Rex can get samples of the genetic codes of these animals, and once he does, you can use them in unit creation.

Each of your units is constructed by combining limbs from two different animals. You’ll be able to combine everything from a great white shark and a polar bear to an ant and a wolverine. The possibilities are staggering. The available limbs include the head, front legs, back legs, main torso, and tail. The creation interface is excellent and you can easily swap between any of these limbs and see the results to your creature in real-time. The benefit to keeping limbs from one creature over another has to do with providing special skills for the creature. One benefit is for animals that have horns. If you combine a ram and a bear, and use the ram’s head, you’ll have a special horn attack for that new unit. With a skunk, if you keep the tail, you’ll be able to perform a stink cloud to daze your enemies.

Being as this is a beta, the gameplay doesn’t feel fully complete. For instance, units aren’t as responsive as they could be and seem to have trouble moving to locations in large groups. There’s also a strange bug where the game will run very choppy when it’s first run after booting your computer. If you close it and run it again (without restarting), it runs perfectly fine.

But, the good news is that those are the only problems I’ve noticed. Besides those technical glitches, the gameplay is a lot of fun. Each level has a multitude of objectives to complete, such as having Lucy research enemy technology, getting Rex into a certain village, protecting allied units from enemy creatures, and destroying enemy buildings. The four levels in the beta became increasingly challenging, starting off slowly introducing you to the gameplay, and quickly forcing you to be a good strategist to overcome overwhelming odds.

All the other technical aspects of the game are nicely implemented. The 3D graphics engine is beautiful. Not only is the genetic combination of the creatures seamless, but the human characters are also very well constructed and can make a wide variety of facial expressions, denoting sadness or anger very distinctly.

Real-time strategy fans that enjoy light-hearted and imaginary games should definitely enjoy this one. The clever unit creation and spirited story line are already intact, looking to make this game a lot of fun. As of now, the game is scheduled to ship during the holiday season.

Preview by Brian Federici.