Impossible Creatures (Microsoft, PC, G8)

(Herald Rating * * * )

If you're sick of slugging it out with guns, baseball bats, tanks or laser-guided photon torpedoes, Impossible Creatures could be your game.

It is Red Alert crossed with Zoo Tycoon, with a bit of Jurassic Park thrown in. The "weapons" are a collection of freakish beasts created by manipulating their DNA.

Talk about a game before its time — the setting is 1937, a date when the atom bomb was little more than a gleam in Oppenheimer's eye — but it seems a ranting, half-mad scientist called Julius Upton has cracked the code of life and is using it to create unholy hybrids on a secret south seas island.

The story is one of the best parts and it is helped along with excellent cut scenes and dialogue. You play Rex Chance, a sort of Indiana Jones character looking for his scientist father, who is missing in the region. He meets Upton and soon realises the mad scientist knows a lot more about his father than he is letting on.

The two fight it out using a collection of hybridised creatures, including a scorpion crossed with a tiger for raw power with a sting in the tail, or a bat with a snake for a stealth unit with radar. And if you get cold, cross a sheep with a kangaroo for a woolly jumper.

Joking apart, Impossible Creatures has high production values, excellent graphics and a great soundtrack.

If you can get a firm handle on the game's bizarre nature, it can become quite addictive. The trick is to try to emulate real weapons with your hybrids — create the equivalent of a tank, infantryman, or amphibious unit and refine the concept until you have something that works.

Despite its strangeness, Impossible Creatures is a conventional real-time strategy game at heart, where collecting resources — coal and electricity to power the lab — is the key to winning.

* Email Peter Eley