Impossible Creatures

Impossible Creatures is the 2003 Relic Entertainment RTS — the team behind Homeworld, Dawn of War and Company of Heroes — set in a 1930s pulp universe where you genetically combine Earth's animals into mutant hybrids to fight an evil villain across a chain of remote islands. The Steam Edition brings the original game to modern systems with technical improvements and Steam-native features layered on.

The creature-creation system is the game's signature. Pick two of fifty-plus source animals and combine their traits — armor, attack types, environments they can traverse, special abilities — into a hybrid unit. The combinations are essentially unlimited: a turtle-elephant tank, a wasp-cheetah scout, a kangaroo-bear with explosive jumping capability. Strategy genuinely emerges from creature design rather than from a fixed unit roster.

Fifteen missions span fourteen distinct islands in the single-player campaign, each with their own environments and ecosystems. The four diverse biomes — each with specific flora and fauna affecting creature performance — push players to build different armies for different scenarios. Replayability is genuinely high because the same mission plays differently depending on which animals you've chosen to combine.

This Steam Edition includes everything: the original game, the Insect Invasion expansion, the Mod SDK in C++, and all patches. Multiplayer for up to six players has been re-implemented with NAT traversal for smooth online play. Steam Friend invites work natively. Steam Cloud handles saves. Streamlined base-building in multiplayer lets you design creatures offline and store them for online battles. The single-player armies are transferable to multiplayer for testing your strategies against humans. The mission editor is included for custom scenarios. For anyone who missed the original release or wants to revisit it on modern hardware, the Steam Edition is the definitive version.