Black Ice

I love this game. I found this game many years ago when the developer was at a video game conference showing off the game and I fell in love with it. I've played it for about 20 plus hours. Some of them on my friend's account and the 14 here. I haven't played in a long time but I am a part of the discord group and I get all the updates and I love that the developer is constantly creating new content for the game after all these years. I know when I played a few years back the UI wasn't amazing but it was fine. I'll have to start playing again see if that's changed or not. If you like shooter games with an RPG aspect try this out. I love the visuals. It's definitely a fun game! There is a demo you can try and if you like it get the main game. The community in the discord is also pretty nice.

Went from being one of the most barebones games in my collection to a bonafide cyberpunk looter shooter. The movement, the story, the options available to you have all grown exponentially since I played this game originally. I especially like the far-future worldbuilding going on through emails and corporation profiles. And bunny hopping while spamming grenades/spells and spewing bullets into a horde of weird little computer spiders is chaotically enjoyable. Very fun! I do have two critiques though. The affixes are poorly messaged on the interface - partially because, well, they aren't really that interesting usually - and your "equipment" space (your hotbar) is very stingy. Would benefit to have a separation of armor and weapons - or at least items you slot into "passives" that aren't on your active hotbar but which provide their affix bonuses. Also the affix bonuses could be cooler and highlighted better in the interface, instead of "+1% hack speed" nestled into four other lines of similar color.

SUPER DUPER

I'm a GenX gamer who grew up as a huge fan of Tron, played the TTRPG Shadowrun, and loved the first two Borderlands games, so when I stumbled across this game a few years ago and saw the tagline "Think Borderlands meets Tron" in the description, I was instantly intrigued. Essentially, this is a looter shooter FPS that does all its storytelling through a series of emails (so, text only!) that you receive asking you to hack various servers located around the map, each represented by a structure that in total make up the geography of the landscape. Every time you hack a server, it spawns a bunch of enemies (intrusion countermeasures, aka ICE) of its color that you have to defeat while staying within a certain radius of the server. You can hack multiple servers at once as long as they're located near one another, and this can be a helpful strategy if they're different colors (representing different industries) as they will fight each other as well as you during the hack. Like any looter shooter, there are TONS of different weapon types to find with lots of modifiers, bonuses, and specials to combo together. One of the special things about Black Ice, however, is the way it allows you to completely customize your "deck" (aka hotbar). You have a certain amount of RAM which determines the number of programs (weapons and other utilities) you can have loaded at any given time on your deck, and you can bind those to not only the 1-6 keys and your right mouse button but also your shift and space buttons (!), meaning you can rebind your jump and sprint to be something completely different or find upgrade utilities for them as well. Wild stuff, and you can make really strange builds as a result. The trailer makes the game look incredibly chaotic and visually noisy, and there are definitely moments when things get hairy, but because combats usually only happen when you trigger a hack (unless you're in obviously dangerous areas), most of the time the game keeps a relatively calm pace until you're ready for the action to get crazy. The most frustrated you're likely to get while playing is when you fall from a very high place and have to spend a long time figuring out how to get back to where you were. Even dying isn't particularly punishing in Black Ice: you lose a chunk of money (which is plentiful enough), and you respawn back near your base. No big shakes, aside from the time you'll spend running. Oh, and did I mention the game supports multiplayer up to TEN PLAYERS? It's my dream to have a server full of hackers jumping and grappling all over the place hacking ICE like it's going out of style, but for now I can only speak to playing with 2 or 3 people, and it's a lot of fun playing in a small squad like that. It's relatively easy to create specialized builds, so if you had a regular group, you could definitely have a squad built to work together spec'd out in interesting ways in this game. The game has bugs, but they are minor and forgivable for a two-person dev team. As of the time of writing, map markers sometimes do not clear from hacked servers after they've been cleared, and sometimes enemies and minions will path very strangely or get stuck entirely and have to despawn, or you'll have to cancel a hack entirely and start over which can be annoying. The devs are extremely responsive to feedback and are active on their Discord, however, and have said they will address the map marker issue above in a future update. Speaking of the devs: this game is obviously a labor of love that has been over a decade in the making, and it shows in the worldbuilding and in the tiny details you'll come across in the game as you play. The storytelling in the emails is good, but the stuff you find organically throughout the environment is really what pulls it all together into a cohesive experience, and they're still expanding and building this world. That's part of why I'm so forgiving of what minor bugs there are, because this is an beautiful, dystopic, evolving world that I want to be a part of, and I think you should too.

jUST PERFECT.

This game has been grown organically and over time. It has done nothing but make improvements and additions that continue to keep my attention for spans at a time. With the ability to hack solo or in MP, you'll enjoy yourself for a good while. You have a wide selection of weapons and items to create unique playstyles that you will only find here at Black Ice, whether it be a quick dashing run n gun, or a summoner of multiple (aim)bots! There are also the minigames. They are short, fun and exactly what a lot of FPS games are missing. Now to the Pro's n Con's for me. (Two notes. One, i have not restarted my character since i first made it back years ago, so i am unsure how that affects my quests, if at all. Two, Can't comment on MP as i don't play it) Pro's: - Original game (as far as i have found) - Many styles of play for you to learn and try out. - A very large map for you to explore with different regions. - Minigames! Not to hard, not too light. - Unique artstyle that fits the retro VR hacker - Great storyboard writing for all of the white/grey/black hacking quests that you do - Active discord that has engaging Super Duper staff that value feedback and are responsive. - floating skyshark. Con's - The game is hard to stick to for long periods of time(Me being a massive adhd stimulus chaser, a couple hours at a time). Reasons: - Leveling can be tedious if you don't have a goal - Questing can be tedious as you have to find quests in the hacks you do - Servers reset every time you close the game. - The talent/perks/upgrade tree recently got a rework and i feel it has become a bit too complex. Subject to change i am sure, but for now, not a fan. (To elaborate, my issue was there are too many tooltips that semi conflict in details with each other, or provide lacking info) - Some of the miniquests within hacks are tricky due to inefficient visual aid on the unit you have to kill (Lock-out bugs/Spider mother) Otherwise i still highly recommend this game for everyone so they can form their own opinions. It's a heck of a blast to play :D

I bought this game years ago when it was a basic 2d landscape. The dev has stuck with it and I've come back like 2 years later and it's a fully 3d with story experience. It's an early access game the dev actually cares about.

I met the devs at Rooster Teeth Expo 2017, and considering their booth was among other games like Grimm Eclipse, Bendy and the Ink Machine, and some game in pre-Alpha called Fortnite, they drew a crowd with their demo and visuals that screamed at the cyberpunk that was just learning what the genre was. I mentioned the landscape and visuals looked like TRON and Garrett Cooper (The Super Duper dev there showcasing) said, "Hold my cup, hand me the keys for a sec." and pulled out a super rare Disc weapon and said, "You're gonna love this then. Go ahead, take it for a spin." The TRON lover in me was sold, the story dug at my chromed cyberpunk heart. Bought the Steam Key right there, even though I wasn't sure it'd run on the toaster of a laptop I had at the time (which it surprisingly ran really well on it). I still have the buttons handed out as freebies and the poster the Super Duper Games team signed hangs over my desk. I got busy playing all these big name titles but I'm excited to see what's new since the game's first years out. As an art alone and fun of the gunplay its a solid title to have in your library that keeps you coming back to it.

Pretty solid looter shooter!

Played it for an hour, my eyes hurt now, ty for reading.