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An early platform classic gets a new lease of left, courtesy of a timely budget re-release.

The original Impossible Mission on the C64 is one of the legends of computer gaming, and though it was never converted to 16-bit, this sequel made very few changes to the winning formula. For the uninitiated, it's a challenging platform game with some fairly minor puzzle elements thrown in mixed with a novel (well, it was novel in its time) lives system which gives you no set number of lives, but a tightish time limit which decreases steadily (except when you get killed, whereupon you lose a big chunk at once).

That's about it for rules, really - it's the immediate playability of Impossible Mission II which makes it so great. It's also got atmosphere in abundance, and a game task that's tough not by sheer size (as is, rather sadly, the case with many games these days) but by dint of the care that's been taken in welding together a relatively small number of elements to produce tricky and brain-teasing situations on every screen.

This is by far the best of the recent clutch of Kixx games, and will give you hours of fun for your eight quid. Invest in a bit of gaming history.

A corking little game with an epic feel that belies its size. Forget all the flash licences - if you're going to buy a re-release this month, get this one.