Impossible Mission II

I remember the first time I fired up Impossible Mission II on my dad's 486ce and wondered what would come out of that speaker. No orchestra, but for 1988 it sounded good enough to keep me at the monitor longer than planned.

Impossible Mission II is an action platformer with puzzles from Hungarian studio Novotrade, released in 1988 for PC and several other platforms. It loosely follows the original Impossible Mission from 1984, which made its mark mainly on the Commodore 64 and became a groundbreaking title for its time. The sequel comes with the same premise: you're an agent, moving through towers full of rooms, avoiding robots and searching for code pieces that unlock access to the final objective. Spy atmosphere, robots, devious traps — nothing fundamentally new, but a functional combination.

Gameplay rests on two pillars: navigating the towers via elevators and exploring rooms. In each room, robots await with predictable but progressively annoying movement patterns, and furniture to search through for pieces of a musical puzzle or codes. You then have to assemble them in the correct order. Controls on PC were a bit clunky in their day — the keyboard didn't give the character the fluidity that joystick players experienced on Commodore. Jumping worked, but landing precision could really get under your skin.

What I remember most are those moments of frustration mixed with satisfaction. Impossible Mission II wasn't an easy game, even by the standards of the time. The puzzle element — assembling fragments into a logical whole — was unusually complex for its era, and I think plenty of players never figured out that final code without help from a classmate who'd copied the solution onto paper. Graphics on the 1988 PC version looked functional, not dazzling. You could tell the difference from the C64 original.

Today Impossible Mission II appeals mainly to those who love games that don't hold your hand — no tutorials, no hints. Either you figure it out or you don't. If you enjoy retro platformers with a puzzle twist and don't mind that the game looks and sounds its age, it's a pleasant couple of hours well spent. You can run it in a browser today via DOSBox-based emulators without trouble, no installation, no drivers — just pure 1988 at a single click.