• 5 Missions encompassing 20 levels of gameplay
• An explosive arsenal of high-tech weapons and gadgetry
• A pulse-pounding mixture of action and intelligence
• Interchangeable 3rd to 1st Person Viewpoint
• Super Smart A.I. adversaries will track you down!
• Full speech driven interaction with IMF members

This game will not self-destruct in five seconds, but you may...Good luck Jim!

Discussion
This review, should you choose to read it, is about a movie license that went in so many different directions that even the programmers don’t know where it ended up.

Mission: Impossible was never meant to be a contender to the Nintendo 64’s Golden Eye or the PlayStation’s Metal Gear crown. Where the former was all about the gunplay and the latter was about sneaking around, M:I is a weird mixture of puzzle solving and occasional gunplay. Here a firearm isn’t the best solution, but merely a last resort.

Most of the game play is based around espionage – get in, get undercover, figure out how to get your information and how to get out in one piece. This sounds cool, and would have been a lot of fun had the designers not stumbled over a few precious steps in the execution.

The game’s biggest problem is that the logical steps to a problem’s solution aren’t always logical. By example – in one area of the game you need certain music to play for a character to appear at a banquet. The sheet music has apparently been taken. In order for it to be retrieved, you need to talk to a group of people several times, and once they sit down, the music sheet magically appears on the chair’s arm. Or there’s the sequence where you must find a radiation suit to protect yourself from toxic fumes and radioactive sludge. The catch is that the suit you need is in an unmarked box underneath radioactive boxes you need to shoot at. Why would you place the one thing that can protect you from what you work with beneath the very thing that can kill you? It’s this train of thought that runs rampant through out the game as you realize the dumbest terrorists and villains co-exist in this universe.

More importantly, many of these mistakes and oversights could have been remedied by a simple hint system or even a better explanation of how an item will affect another. One level you’re told to use explosive gum to distract guards, except you’re never told the gum can only be used on specific locations for success. I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out why the guards would not take the bait until I accidentally passed by the one thing that would ‘use’ the gum as I made a run for it. No, it wasn’t a fish tank.

With a little more cohesiveness, the huge amount of variety in the game could have been a huge success. Instead, it comes off as a muddled mess, the story line is too broken up to be of any use, and the rest of the game simply falls into place.

The game is actually worth a frustrating single play-through, but after that, it can self destruct any time it wants.
 

• Very loosely based on the movie featuring Tom Cruise (1996).
   
• Tom Cruise would not allow his likeness to be used, so in standard fashion the main character has been modified to look a bit close to him. The only catch is that his CG model, used in artwork and ads, looks freaking scary.
   
•  There is a very odd glitch in the Sniper Train stage. You're supposed to be covering Ethan via sniping enemies by following him. However, if you pan over as far right as possible and look past a column, you'll see two enemy characters standing still. You can shoot and kill them, but they will never react, and they will always re-spawn.
   
• Another game that is 'locked out' when using a GameShark. It will not read a Memory Card with a GS plugged in, and if you try to load a Save Data with the GS intact, it corrupts the Save Data.
   
• In the movie, Ethan Hunt never fires a gun. In the game, the only way to pull off certain level requirements without a gun would be to punch everyone / everything. Not easy to do...unless you were cheating.
   
• In the game, there is a situation where a villain tells people that Ethan Hunt is really an undercover actor, and several NPCs start commenting on the 'movies' he has made.
   
• The game designers never explain a feature that the game's foam face mask has. When Ethan applies the mask, his clothes also change along with him. There is no mention of there being a holographic projector or any reason for the added clothes change.