Uplink
Out of a lot of the hacking games I’ve played in my time, this has to have it’s seat right next to Hacknet, as one of my ‘Two best hacking games I’ve played’.
To some extent, it is pretty much an RPG, just for hacking.
You take up a contract - Or a ‘Quest’ - You do what the contract says - Destroy a mainframe, or change a social security record, et cetera - and then you get paid with a handful of credits - Or “Gold” - which you then use to upgrade your system, be it a Gateway upgrade, a new processor, or applications that will further unlock your hacking capabilities. - Or in terms of the RPG comparison here; You level up your character, you get new weapons, and unlock new skills.
– Real player with 269.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Hacking Strategy Games.
This is really everything I wanted from an indie hacking game. It is a vast and glorious sandbox brimming with opportunity. To tell its tale, let me start the story about twenty-five years ago, with a little gem from Interplay called “Neuromancer.”
Neuromancer was an amazing piece of work, for its time. A point and click adventure game, yes, but with a vast collection of BBS-like “sites” in “cyberspace,” which could be accessed and navigated spatially, a sea of semitransparent polygons on a sprawling grid. They called the book “prophetic” in its vision of what a global computer network might be like, but the game was similarly visionary, in that it offered a classic milestone-and-unlocked-door-driven main story, but with a vast and layered world of enriching side stories and tiny details easily overlooked, that add depth and character to the world in which your character lives. This was a level of detail and nuance and supporting gameworld-enrichment that Bioware would go on to become famous for, in its epic D&D games of the Nineties, and in its later adventure games, but in the Eighties, on computers that were much more limited in resources, this was a bigger feat, and a bigger surprise to the player. You could just play Neuromancer to win it, or you could play it to learn about it, follow the exchanges on the PAX and on private sites, the private message exchanges between AIs. You could learn so much more that way, if you were clever and patient enough to retain it, to piece it together, and to make sense of it all.
– Real player with 109.0 hrs in game
Counter Terrorist Agency
This is my revised and final review now that I’ve had a fair bit more time with it.
CTA is a game I’ve wanted for a long time, which is why it comes as such a disappointment that so little thought was put into its design. I love the idea of tracking terrorist groups, deciding how and when to strike, collecting intelligence, and ultimately trying to prevent attacks. Unfortunately, it’s let down by shallow and often unclear mechanics. The devs were active in the beginning, responding to criticism and quickly putting out an update that greatly increased the quantity of scenarios in the game, and more have been added since. However, they seem to have been silent for just over a month now, and the Steam forums have been completely dead for over a week. They claim to be working on a pair of updates that would add a sort of “free mode”, as well as a much-requested re-work of the case file system. Unfortunately, I’m not convinced these will be enough to solve the fundamental problems this game suffers from.
– Real player with 18.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Hacking Strategy Games.
Overview
Counter Terrorist Agency is what the old game Covert Action would have been if the player were in a higher-up position, not every troublemaker had a name of a Spanish or Arabic origin, and relations and resources of nations were an issue. Things usually start out with suspicious behavior making the news, threats made to reporters, or just an intercepted phone call in which two people may say something suspicious, and from there, the player orders agents to go to work by having a suspect’s phone tapped and their social media accounts hacked, then waiting for more conversations in which the suspect’s role within an organization can be verified depending on the contents of the conversation. (The player may be able to guess at the role of the person they’re speaking to if that person infers they have any authority over the person the player tapped/hacked.) Once enough suspects have been identified, it’s time to stop the terrorists from acting by either arresting or killing (preferably) confirmed members. Arrested terrorists can possibly be interrogated revealing more people involved in their plot. (Interrogation can possibly even reveal a leader’s identity.)
– Real player with 9.1 hrs in game