Cyber Ops
This game is great and I’m kinda sad it got so many bad reviews. It’s challenging but honestly it’s not nearly as hard as people make it out to be. Once you figure out the mechanics it’s challenging but perfectly feasible after a couple of tries. It had some bugs at launch but they have all been fixed already.
Great atmosphere, good voice acting, nice looking interface and very singular gameplay. Being the guardian angel hacker behind a screen while the operators actually do the work might not be for everyone but I personally love it.
– Real player with 25.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Hacking Real Time Tactics Games.
Every negative review is sadly 100 % correct. Only 25 % ever made 1st mission. Only 0,3 % players ever finished the game and 1 % just hacked the “game finished " achievement, because more players finished game than finished last mission. You will be fighting the logic breaking UI problems more than “triangle” enemies. All moving enemies are called “turrets” when killed. You don’t know at this moment if cyborg or human enemy type died.
You will NOT be able to win after level 5 without good oldschool health cheats. The game is so buggy that some mechanics needed for victory don’t works sometimes. I won spider-tank level 6 fight legit first, but squad just glitched at the door when leving the cathedral. QTE skillchecks are also broken or start at unwinnable state.
– Real player with 23.1 hrs in game
Midnight Protocol
I don’t have many games in my library - I’m quite picky in my tastes. I’m not usually one for hacking games but the Demo left me wanting more. After 22 enjoyable hours, I’m evidently happy to have added this game in my library. I waited to give this revieuw untill I finished the story for the first time - It will certainly not be the last. I’ll take some time to revieuw a few aspects of the game that might interest you most:
Gameplay/Mechanics: 8/10
A game is nothing without gameplay, and a hacking game sets a promise: it will not be just ‘a game’ - but one with depth, complexity, and decision making. To achieve this, Midnight protocol structures its gameplay around levels that feel like a labyrinth or puzzle. A Digital dungeon, if you will. To get around the various obstacles such as firewalls, encrypted nodes and ‘antagonistic’ system operators that chase you down you get access to hardware you can tailor to your playstyle, as well as a host of programs each with their own up- and downsides. You quickly learn how to balance them carefully, using fairly easy commands to allocate memory to the programs you need in order to finish the level. Suffice to say, Midnight protocol nails the hacker-feel you’ll expect. It is not all roses and sunshine of course - there is quite a reliance on RNG to many of the mechanics of the game that can make you second guess your decisions while they are actually fine, or save you when you know you had no right to make it. Aside from that, i found myself at times trying a level, finding where the hidden obstacles were, and avoiding them alltogether once I got to reload the level. This was- at times-unavoidable, and felt wrong. I’ve since noticed that these hidden obstacles are slightly randomized, at least in some levels, which alleviated this somewhat. Perhaps the developers could not just list potential ICE, but also include a map at the beginning of the mission (once you enter a mission you see the layout anyway, except in rare instances), that does not show the obstacles, but layout of the nodes beforehand. With this information I feel I personally would not have had to reload to adapt my strategy as much as I did.
– Real player with 41.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Hacking Singleplayer Games.
| 🔵 POI | ✔️ Pos | ❌ Neg | 💡 Ideas | 🍿 Video | ⭐ STAR |
FINAL REVIEW
🔵Ultimately MP is a puzzle game running under the guise of a hacker game.
🔵Each Network is a puzzle, and you must defeat the puzzle using commands & tools.
🔵MP could be considered a Lightweight Hacker game which introduces turn-based gameplay
🔵Has some additional unique and impressive gameplay mechanics.
🔵I was instantly Immersed by the story and the characters.
– Real player with 29.2 hrs in game
hack_me
Hack Me is the beginning of a hack simulator gaming trilogy which no longer appears on the Steam Store. It was originally created by 2 Belarus Indie Developers Egor Magurin https://twitter.com/IndoversStudio and Eugene RadaeV. I find it ironic that these developers themselves were VAC banned and caught for cheating/hacking CSGO within 76 hrs of gameplay. Who better to sell us a hacking simulator than 2 has-been wannabe noob CSGO hackers? That’s poetry right there.
If you’re expecting this to be a realistic hacking simulator you will be quickly disappointed. It’s more a press spacebar or left mouse button simulator, with all the hacking jive being filled in for you. When you do come across area’s where you do get to type, you better put in the exact info needed or the game sort of locks up by not responding properly when you put in the correct answer soon thereafter. When this happens, you will need to escape back to main menu and reload chapter. There are 10 mission all up with 14 chapters, all of them involving you to toy around with at least one of the 3 hacking programmes on your desktop and either check your mail or chat for job information. There is also a hint button on the right-hand side to help you if you get stuck.
– Real player with 12.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Hacking Singleplayer Games.
Basic Information
Title: hack_me
Developers: Egor Magurin & Eugene Radaev
Publisher: MegawattsCo
Genre: Simulator
General Impression
Hacking simulations available for purchase on the Steam Store are neither a novelty nor even limited in numbers. Indeed this seems to be an ever expanding subgenre that attacts and nurtures a dedicated fanbase. That being said, hack_me might not revolutionize hacking sims but it doesn’t fail to deliver a compelling experience either. For a game that can be finished in about two hours or less (depending on how thorough and patient you are) it manages to offer exactly what it promises through the screenshots and gameplay video. In all honesty, it’s not the type of game that might get by with doctored images which would falsely advertise something else. What you see is what you get. Perhaps it still has some potential for gameplay expansion once it leaves Early Access stage.
– Real player with 2.6 hrs in game
Project DeepWeb
bit of a brain teaser and im stuck, but im sufficiently intrigued to try and figure it out
update: i finished the game, would definitely recommend
– Real player with 18.1 hrs in game
Very good game, full of difficult puzzles.
– Real player with 9.3 hrs in game
Hacknet
shell
! 74.125.23.121
shell
! 216.239.32.181
shell
! 210.81.156.7
shell
! 206.44.131.159
connect
! 226.187.99.3
Scanning for
! 226.187.99.3 ……………………………..
Connection Established ::
Connected to
! EnTech_Offline_Cycle_Backup
! (Actually the credits server lol)
! 226.187.99.3@ probe
Probing
! 226.187.99.3 ………………………………
– Real player with 38.0 hrs in game
While this game is being sold as a “hacking simulator”, a debate will likely rage about what exactly it simulates. In either case, it comes suspiciously close to being a realistic simulation of hacking. So close, in fact, I’m left wondering why the dev didn’t go the extra yards to make it inarguably so (maybe something he can shoot for in the future). Realism nit-picking aside, this game is full of very realistic nods to hacker and IRC culture, and in broad strokes, represents some of what goes on in actual exploits. While the experience of compromising systems is streamlined for the sake of keeping it an actual game (again, is it a puzzle game or a simulator?), in that “push a button, get bacon” sort of way you see in “hacker” movies, there was still much in the game that reminded me of taking the OSCP (for those who know my pain, you will find much in each mission to make you smile in that corpse-like rictus you had while laughing at emails and files during enumeration pratice in the Offsec lab).
– Real player with 28.4 hrs in game
Leak Elite
I will play more soon but I said I would check out the game after I finished my exams and I stuck to it. I really enjoy it. Thank you very much for making this game it is really good. It is definitely worth the money. Also thanks the the untrusted avatar :).
– Real player with 0.2 hrs in game
Hacker Simulator
The game is fine. There are a lot of features I was expecting that are simply missing. Tab completion in the terminal is missing. A place to sell accounts a “darknet” if you will. Finding bank accounts to steal money from. Currently the only way to make money is to do contracts.
These don’t pay much and feel grindy. You will quickly get bored because there is not enough variation in mission types. Making money takes a while most missions (in the first 10 hours at least) pay out 10 “shellcoins” which are bitcoins in the universe. The more “advanced” missions require you to compile a custom exploit which costs money (you can’t sell this exploit to the darknet). You need to buy 3 different files which will cost you ~12 shellcoins and you’ll end up making maybe 15 coins from the mission.
– Real player with 30.2 hrs in game
First, I like this game. It fun. BUT devs listen… it’s slow and grindy. I hear there are cool things in the late game. I want to get there, but right now, I’m bored.
Next, just an observation about most simulator games, this one included, what do I do with all this money? I beg of you, give me something to do with this money! Can I buy a new apartment? Decorate this one? Leave my house, like… ever? Go shopping? If there is nothing to do with the money, except make more money, then the game will quickly die in our libraries. Having money is only fun if you can spend it. Otherwise, it’s just pretty paper.
– Real player with 11.3 hrs in game
Quadrilateral Cowboy
Quadrilateral Cowboy is a story about having those youthful, exciting, and often dangerous experiences with a really tight-knit group of friends as you journey through life together, and then growing old to reflect fondly on those memories.
It is all very beautiful to experience.
Half the game is a story that unfolds, and the other half is puzzle solving. The tale is quite moving, and the puzzles are very reasonably difficult, and quite rewarding. If you know Chung’s work, you know what to expect as far as the ‘experience’ or flavor. Otherwise, here is a test to gauge if you will like this game. If two of the three apply to you, then I highly recommend you buy it:
– Real player with 9.8 hrs in game
The game has some great ideas and nice attention to detail, but I felt like it never came together.
A lot of mechanics get introduced and then forgotten. New mechanics replace the old ones instead of building on them. There’s hardly any increase in complexity as you go along.
All the levels are simple and focused on 1 to 2 of the avialable mechanics. The rest is either not used at all or simply taken away from the player, sometimes for 1 mission and other times forever.
Because of all this, the game became way too easy later on. Instead of having puzzles to solve, you just go through the motions. Click this, click that, go here, go there. Some timer here and there. No challenge whatsoever. Not to mention you can ‘cheat’ your way though a lot of the levels.
– Real player with 6.8 hrs in game
Else Heart.Break()
So many bugs, so little help. You have to coax the game into continuing the storyline. God forbid you didn’t spend five to ten minutes walking back to the hotel to sleep at night, otherwise you might fall asleep before you finish a key plot point action that has roughly a minute-long window to do. The premise seemed fun, but I am having the hardest time even getting the first few things done.
The backpack system is a mess, especially given the fact that you’re going to want to collect every floppy disk you find. There are tons, so you’ll be constantly flipping through them, dropping them places you’ll hopefully remember you dropped them, and potentially rediscovering them later.
– Real player with 56.7 hrs in game
This game drove me crazy. I finally finished it, but I wouldn’t have been able to without consulting the online forum repeatedly. There is a lot of great potential here, but most of it is wasted. The first thing to realize is that this is not a “programming game”, in the sense that none of the difficult aspects of the game have anything to do with tricky programming puzzles (unlike, say, Zachtronics games). This game is a role-playing point-and-click adventure that happens to feature programming (hacking) as a key component. The game features an in-game programming language called Sprak, which is a pretty simple imperative language that nobody with any programming experience will have any trouble with. However, very little real programming is necessary to progress in the game; usually you just modify tiny snippets of code and then you’re done. (Basically, the game makes you into a script kiddie.) The one difficult aspect of programming in the game is figuring out just which built-in commands are available. The game helps you a bit with this, but every programmable device has a different set of built-in commands, and some critical ones are only found in a few places. But the biggest problem with this game is the plot. The plot progression is wildly uneven, with long stretches where nothing is happening punctuated by short bursts where critical stuff is happening all at once. Plot triggers are very easy to miss, and if you do, you will wander around forever trying to figure out what you should be doing, while none of the in-game characters will talk to you. Worse, many triggers require you to behave in exactly the opposite way that the game suggests you ought to behave, or thwart your expectations in other ways. Contrarily, many things the game suggests you should be doing turn out to be completely unnecessary and a waste of time. The worst part of it, for me, was that the programming part of the game can’t start until you get a hold of something called a “modifier”, and it is by no means easy to do so. I probably played for 20 hours or so before giving up and consulting the forums to find out how to get this absolutely critical piece of equipment, without which the game cannot progress. The best (non-spoiler) advice I can give you is to talk to every person you meet, and keep talking until all possible conversation paths are exhausted. Also, the game world is large enough that it’s very easy to get lost, and although you have a map, it’s pathetically bad, with many important landmarks left off. And when you finally get a modifier, you still aren’t out of the woods. You have to figure out how to join a kind of “resistance” against an evil system, and again, it’s very easy to completely miss the trigger that will get you into this group. Once you do, the game (finally!) starts to take off. This is fun for a while, but nothing you do matters much until the final confrontation happens, which will be glaringly obvious. However (once again!) what you need to do to fix things will not be obvious, so you are left wandering around again while nobody will talk to you, wondering what you should be doing (this seems like a theme here). When you finally realize what you need to do, doing it is quite easy as long as you can get into a particular room. There are floppy disks scattered all around the world that contain hints and clues, as well as code examples that you can learn from. You will need to spend a lot of time looking at these unless you (like me) run out of patience and just consult the online forum, and then you can literally finish the game in five minutes. There are multiple endings: several “you lose” kind of endings and one “you win” ending which is so unsatisfying it feels like you just lost a bit less. To sum up, I think this game had huge potential, but it was ruined by poor execution. I almost can’t fault the developers for this; to do a game like this right requires more resources than a small team can provide. I think in the hands of someone like Valve, with expert writers and large numbers of playtesters, this game could have been something amazing. As it is, it’s more of a proof of concept. (OK, great, concept proved! Now go make a real game!) If you’re going to play this game, save yourself endless frustration and consult the online forums when you get stuck.
– Real player with 51.0 hrs in game
Sorry, James
Sorry James fails to deliver on its promises of intrigue.
I came across this title on Humble Bundle, and was hooked on the promises of a non-linear mystery to unravel in a work simulation setting. I have found moments in the recent past where I adored this sort of world building (thinking “Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You”). I snatched it up. I am always ready to enjoy an indie experimental narrative. I never expected to come out the other end disappointed. I felt I had become the victim of really good marketing materials, which ended up to feel more intriguing than the actual story itself.
– Real player with 28.3 hrs in game
Review of the gameplay - It’s fine. The puzzles are decent, and the difficulty increases at a good rate. Turn off the VX option AS SOON AS YOU START THE GAME. It doesn’t cause any bugs, but it makes reading some of the puzzle tiles difficult. It’s purely a retro aesthetic that isn’t needed. It’s worth the $2.50 for the puzzles I suppose.
I hit “not recommended” for this game based on the story though. Anyone who wants to create a story telling mechanic like this please repeat this mantra while punching yourself in the head “Non-linear storytelling doesn’t mean ‘open for interpretation’.” While I’m sure at least a couple of you are the smug type who already has a comment about “not needing the story spoon fed to me”, I stand by this next point. ‘Open for interpretation’ doesn’t work unless there’s still a satisfying payoff to go with it. This game sets up a few interesting ideas and threads and then leaves you to deal with all of them.
– Real player with 16.8 hrs in game