Re-Mission, developed by HopeLab, is a game centered around fighting cancer. It was developed primarily for young people fighting cancer by entertaining them as well as reinforcing the importance of maintaining their medication regimen. The player takes the role of Roxxi, a cancer-fighting nanobot.

As Roxxi, you travel through various parts of cancer patients' bodies and fight things like bacteria and cancer cells. The game plays like a fairly standard third-person shooter with a vertical element allowing you to travel up and down. Initially, the controls for this movement feel awkward but they work surprisingly well after a little practice.

Your mentor in the game is Smitty, an older model of nanobot who is less energetic than Roxxi. Essentially, the character interaction consists of either Roxxi playing loud music, flying very fast, or aiming her gun at him; and Smitty being annoyed that she is so reckless, or Smitty giving the player instructions. Roxxi's character is annoying because she never stops saying cheesy one-liners. I got very tired of her telling me how much she likes to blow stuff up and listen to fast music after the second time, much less the thirtieth.

The game plays out through a series of essentially unconnected missions where the goal is to go into a patient's body and destroy the cancer, reduce the fever, etc. The missions tended to be very linear, and, while the game play remains more or less the same throughout, the objectives changed just enough that it did not feel very repetitive.

While the game doesn't teach a great deal about cancer itself, it does do a good job of reinforcing the importance of regularly taking medication and listening to your doctor if you have been diagnosed with cancer. Again, beyond that I'm not sure it is helpful to a person without cancer.

The game looks very good with graphics equivalent to near-modern games. I say near-modern because it doesn't look like a top of the line modern commercial game, but it is nevertheless very good. The overall artistic concept is coherent and fits the theme well, taking a cartoon-style approach to the character design.

The game runs well for being so graphically intensive. I came across one bug; but I didn't see it mentioned on their message boards or their website, so perhaps it was an incompatibility issue. The bug was strange -- only one quarter of the screen would be rendered, except certain enemy types would be rendered as an untextured model on the other three-quarters. I was able to fix the issue by changing the screen resolution, so it was far from game-breaking. Otherwise it runs well and without a problem.

The game, as far as I can tell, is aimed at middle- and high-schoolers and is easily played by both, although it is challenging to the point where younger players may want to turn the difficulty down.

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