Mission: Impossible Arcade (Arcade)

The Mission: Impossible franchise does like to give high-tech gadgets to its agents to support its action and intrigue, but usually it tries to avoid going fully into the realm of science-fiction. The devices are meant to feel more like something we could have in the near future, which makes it particularly odd when the 2021 arcade game based on the franchise decides to do something Mission: Impossible hasn’t done before and have you face off with armies of androids. Perhaps there was some odd clause in the licensing contract where the rights holders didn’t want people shooting at humans, and while a rogue AI does become a crucial plot element in the Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoing Part One and its follow-up, those films were released a few years after this arcade game. Whatever the motivation was for the android army, Mission: Impossible Arcade does still try to evoke the films where it can, the player just needing to look past the waves of white robots to appreciate the references.

 

Mission: Impossible Arcade sees you playing as an aspiring agent of the Impossible Mission Force, the secret U.S. intelligence agency using your set of upcoming missions as a test to see if you have what it takes to work with legendary agent Ethan Hunt. Depending on how you play, this can manifest a bit differently. Mission: Impossible Arcade is available in two player and four player arrangements, each player using a pair of mounted handguns to shoot at the screen in this light gun shooter. In the four player arrangement, you’ll see players split into two teams, Team Beta and Team Reco pitted against each other not in combat, but in a test of efficacy. The team that can clear a mission more quickly or achieve a better score for the more atypical ones will be declared that mission’s winner, with some missions even ending a little differently like the losing team learning they were going after a decoy instead of the real danger. If there aren’t enough players for the competitive angle or you’re on a two player cabinet you’ll instead compete against a hypothetical second team, but during the mission you will see a bar indicating their progress and will still need to outdo them to earn the best endings to each stage. While mostly there for flavor, even the hypothetical opponents can do pretty well at their mission, making for an interesting secondary goal to shoot for beyond just trying to survive the gunfire of waves upon waves of enemy androids.

For the missions themselves, a fellow IMF candidate named Glenn talks through your objectives, his energy and Scottish accent making him an enjoyable companion with a fair few memorable lines, often because he’ll repeat them. Mission: Impossible Arcade features three major levels each split into three smaller stages. One of the larger levels involves trying to board a moving train to save a captured agent, another is a building infiltration to try and stop the remote sale of a piece of dangerous software, but the Special Mission feels more like a set of disconnected extra ideas like crawling through air ducts or fighting foes while riding a motorcycle. Depending on the mission, Mission: Impossible Arcade can feel like it wants to lean more into secret agent fantasies but can’t justify it for too long since you’d be left not using your pair of handguns for a while if it did commit. There are a few missions like crafting a disguise or doing the famous drop through a laser grid where the game does fully embrace gameplay besides gunfire, the player instead needing to time presses of a large button when the indicators are lined up to properly perform the current task. It is a very simple mission type because it’s just a timing test and they’re often more like breathers rather than intense trials on their own, the game much more likely to take a moment and ask you to attempt stealth that immediately goes awry or do something that only takes a bit like using your guns to point at the buttons you need to press on a keypad.

 

The shooting is the main attraction even with the little minigame moments to give the game more of its recognizable identity, Mission: Impossible Arcade making an interesting choice with its dual handgun set-up. If you only fire one of the guns at a time, your shots will be more accurate, but firing both will give you the higher output which can be crucial to dealing enough damage before an enemy has a chance to strike back. For most of the standard enemy androids, they will begin opening fire fairly quickly, but their bullets will only start hitting once they’ve turned fully red. The red highlight starts at their feet and rises up towards their heads, making it almost like a filling meter, and while there are enemies who break from the standard white robot model to indicate their meters will fill more quickly, Mission: Impossible Arcade also seems to give a little leeway in that the foe still needs a fraction of a second to actually fire so you sometimes feel like you took them out in the nick of time. Headshots will defeat foes more quickly and there are special enemy types such as large boxy robots that take more punishment to put down, but the faceless and simple androids that mostly stand in place and fire at you can feel a little bland. The red filling indicator makes it a little too easy to notice who you don’t need to attack, most androids don’t try to dodge much, and while some setpieces are nominally exciting, your emotionless simplistic foes can feel more like targets rather than dangerous foes.

You will find enemies landing hits all the same, often through the tougher robots that crop up or the ones that attack almost instantly as they appear, but Mission: Impossible Arcade doesn’t feel like it’s particularly challenging so much as eventually getting in its hits and having them hit hard enough if you’re playing too well that they can make up for hitting less.  There are some boss fights that do provide some more memorable encounters though, one an homage to the scene in the first film where a helicopter chases you through a tunnel while a mission with a more intelligent and active android provides a robot with more memorable tricks than pointing their gun at you and maybe occasionally rolling.

 

The gunplay isn’t bad, and while some interruptions like needing to time a grappling hook shot right or knocking back an enemy with the start button hammering aren’t invigorating the experience, it does pull you out of the trigger fanning that most of the action encourages. Besides an end of mission rank you can shoot for that rewards tight aiming, going for the head, and breaking environmental objects, there isn’t much to playing Mission: Impossible Arcade beyond trying to take out all the robots, which is one reason why the competitive angle was a nice addition. Even if you’re taking out androids without much trouble, seeing you’re a few steps behind the other team might motivate you to play a bit better or make you anxious as you’re falling behind and might not have the room to make up ground. It’s fortunate it’s not that important too, the player not being robbed of credits just because they can’t keep up with how the other potentially hypothetical team is performing.

THE VERDICT: Mission: Impossible Arcade’s odd choice to use androids as enemies in a franchise that has never featured them does lead to a fairly unexciting enemy force, most of them too simple to serve as more than basic targets. However, Mission: Impossible Arcade does pay homage to the movies in some effective ways by reproducing some of its more memorable fights and iconic scenes like the laser grid descent, even if that descent just ends up a minigame about pressing the button at the right time. The competitive angle between teams does encourage you to tighten up your shooting while the dual handgun setup allows for you to pick between accuracy or output on the fly, but Mission: Impossible Arcade blends in with other light gun arcade games because its unique ideas are either too humble or don’t spice up the action quite enough.

 

And so, I give Mission: Impossible Arcade for arcade machines…

An OKAY rating. Mission: Impossible Arcade plays it pretty safe even beyond making sure its enemies are bloodless robots so it can fit into any arcade. When it wants an interaction beyond firing at foes, it’s often just pressing a button a bunch, pressing it with the right timing, or doing the cute keypad typing by way of pointing your gun, but that’s often not exciting, its just a disruption to avoid the gunplay fully stagnating and giving a chance for the game to better pretend it’s about stealthy secret agent action. It’s almost comical how bad your agent can be at sneaking around to keep up the action’s pace, but committing to pure gunplay could have helped it if there was more enemy variety or situations that asked for more interesting choices. The choice between accuracy or firing with both weapons is one with some potential, especially since the team competition rewards you if you kill robots more quickly and can keep moving. At the same time, firing quickly can do the job well enough in most situations or a player with accurate aim can tear through foes a bit too easily with the one gun option. The androids filling with red to indicate they’re about to attack makes the action feel fair but also maybe gives away too much about how little danger there can be during the flashy action setpieces, it a little strange to have five robots all in front of you firing machine guns and not one of them is hitting you as you stand there because it’s not their turn. The feel of the experience ends up a little off with setpieces not being quite as exciting as they need to be to distract you from the more artificial parts of the adventure. At the same time though, Mission: Impossible Arcade doesn’t fail as a shooter, you do need to be involved and changing situations like boss fights or rare enemy types do vary up things just a touch. It’s not likely a machine that will draw players back again and again, but going through all the missions once still provides enough for some entertainment and the team competition angle can make you take it a bit more seriously than a shooter that’s only about surviving to the end.

 

Mission: Impossible Arcade hits some of the expected parts of the movie franchise it is adapting while making unusual choices in other parts of the design, but whether it’s the faithful elements or wholly invented ones, it doesn’t push the envelope enough to make it more than another lightly enjoyable arcade shooter. A light gun game released in the 2020s likely doesn’t feel the need to take risks or try to innovate, Mission: Impossible Arcade probably an acceptable fixture in whatever arcade it finds itself in because its name recognition holds some weight, the safe route for design here likely making it a profitable inclusion amongst other cabinets. Its softer touch in terms of difficulty can even make it more approachable than more memorable light gun games and maybe that’s why we’re fighting foes who could fit into a child friendly arcade environment, but it is not creative enough to really stick with players or draw them back for another round.