The Endless Mission review

The Endless Mission Early Access Review

Endless opportunities.

The Endless Mission review

The Endless Mission is difficult to review in conventional terms, as it skillfully subverts every genre it celebrates. Try to put in in a box and it leaks out the sides. As messy as the concept has the potential to be, it contains itself mostly in a central hub, giving you access to UGC, professionally created games, and a parallel storyline that somehow never feels like an afterthought.

The premise of the game is that you are free to explore a futuristic hub with hidden secrets, leading to the three core elements of The Endless Mission. Firstly, you have the ability to play other people’s games. You can explore new worlds and see what users have created – my personal favourite being a game where a single pineapple was hidden in a huge, realistically textured map, prompting hours of searching with absolutely zero context. 

Secondly, you can create your own levels and mash different genres together. For example, an RTS game with platformer models and a racing background. It sounds basic, but the combinations are limitless considering that the shape, size, gravity and physics of everything and more can be tweaked to your own specifications.

Thirdly, there is a linear-plot game that follows your adventures as a strangely mute humanoid with magic USB hands. You journey into mystical realms, lava-filled jungles, and all manner of game genres to find out just what is going on. Sounds ludicrous, and it is, but while you play these levels you are rewarded with skills and power-ups that allow you to manipulate objects around you. 

The sheer amount of stuff going on on The Endless Mission means the expectation for gimmicks and walking-before-running may be high, but it genuinely makes every element feel solid and complete. You can play mini RTS games, the kind you may have played at school on a flash site; you can peruse other people’s irreverent game designs and contemplate their motives (don’t); you can engage with a storyline that takes you inside each genre so you understand them and empathise with the characters who occupy those little pixels on your screen. 

Each individual concept is so well articulated that the occasional janky control or glitching dialogue is forgivable. It does happen, but being in Early Access and considering the scope of the game itself, there is no reason to dwell on these issues. Many of them also turn out to be plot-fodder, allowing you to fix them with a little bit of coding, or using the ‘hacks’ that you pick up on your travels. 

One downside is that The Endless Mission seems to struggle even on a relatively powerful mid-range PC. Granted, it’s in Early Access so I wouldn’t want to judge too harshly, but I do worry about its potential as a teaching tool if it cant be run on a standard set-up. For a game as vivid and enchanting to be limited in its audience would be a great shame. 

Although it has great potential as an educational tool for children, adults should be quick to jump in. The Endless Mission features enough semi-challenging tasks, hidden areas, adult references, and retro fun to satisfy gamers of all levels. Playing some of the basic platformers made me feel like a kid again – mildly irritated at the clunkiness of the game but entranced and determined to complete it.

Somehow the creators of The Endless Mission have managed to simplify such a complex concept by having a running tutorial where everything you discover is a new find. You are free to explore and develop your skills, with the possibility of coding or using a more basic set of ‘lenses’ that allow for spatial, global, or physics-related tweaks.

The joy of this game-creator-within-a-game is the wild capabilities for community-sourced content. Obviously the code is curbed here and there so you don’t accidentally cause a full internet blackout across the whole of Europe or something, but there is enough freedom to really have some silly fun with the tools at hand. Irreverent humour, meme games, and earnest reprisals of throwback classics will all occur in this library, and its reliance on community brings a little of what made games like Little Big Planet so wholesome and replayable – but with a little more finesse.

The Endless Mission gives older gamers the chance to feel like unbridled, unrestricted kids in an imaginary world full of possibilities. There are no adults to tell you what to do, and you can decide what kind of environment you want to create or destroy. It is anarchic and irreverent, crammed with quirky characters and flashes of brilliance. This game is the perfect teaching tool for younger generations also, doing away with stuffy “edutainment” game culture and creating something that truly rewards creativity in C#.

[Reviewed on PC]