FULL DISCLOSURE: I haven’t played the popular games of the hacking simulator genre, like Hacknet and Uplink. Yet, I knew that what I was playing didn’t have much to do with hacking sims, and it played very much like a cringe-worthy visual novel. The game is poorly advertised and I feel sympathy for anyone who paid the five dollar price tag; the game is just terrible and it’s barely a game at all. The most gameplay that HACK_IT offers is clicking for the next screen and the occasional, frustrating mini-game, reminiscent of a Newgrounds game.
The premise of the game is that the player is an anonymous hacker that meets up with an experienced one. It isn’t explained how they met, it just happens and the visual novel begins, all the player does for at least the first 30 minutes is click Next. Then it starts giving out slightly more complex tasks, such as remembering pin codes for the next screen, mini-games that use arrow buttons/WASD, and a console to type in exactly what the dialogue tells the player to type in.
Overall this game was incredibly boring. With the side missions included, the game is about one hour and twenty minutes; although it feels like an eternity because even when spam clicking, there are screens that make the player wait while a program loads or your computer boots up.
The game is poorly edited with several spelling errors, making it look unprofessional. The graphics aren’t much, and the background is usually black or blue, depending on whether the screen is currently on the connect tool or the desktop. The game has a glitchy VHS style, which is straining to the eyes, then made infinitely worse when a “virus” is uploaded to your computer.
The dialogue is meaningless, the use of emoticons and cringe-worthy lines such as “no u wont lol”, makes the game’s advertised “Narrative Hacking Experience”, a seriously unfunny joke. There are hacker buzzwords, for example, script kiddies and keyboard warriors.
I am unsure if the game developer intended for the game to be as embarrassingly awkward as it turned out. Every other piece of dialogue has an emoticon, there are references to memes and other chunks of Internet culture, like a Cat meme folder, “trigger” and “m8.” It also appears to be savvy in Internet trolling, with an entire 20 minutes taken up in a stupid goose chase that ends with the “VirusMan,” the main hacker that the player interacts with, saying he thought it was funny.
The player’s “emotion” is displayed intermittently throughout the story, usually along the lines of *You feel excited.* I don’t think I even need to express how dumb that is. The emotion “feature” in-game functions more like the player’s thoughts actually, with lines like “You have no idea what’s going on*.
That line is frighteningly accurate because at several points in this “Interactive Hacking Experience”, the player will have no idea what is going on. From the dream sequence “Don’t touch the wall” games, to the “I like Blue” computer crash screens.
The game is odd, it seems to be appealing to the indie game audience much more than the hacking sim fans. It still borrow ideas from the genre, one of the bonus missions involving changing a client’s grades. Yet it offers none of the fun from the genre, the paranoia of being caught or the hacking puzzle elements. HACK_IT is insanely barebones, and, despite it having a money “mechanic,” it doesn’t show your account, making the in-game choices mean even less.
This game clearly isn’t finished. Despite it being fully released, it has spelling errors, little to no actual gameplay, and an absurd story. It might have been intended to be cool or funny, but it comes off as seriously lame and dated. The dialogue is about the same as Facebook messages, with emoticons and the like. The game even tries to use XD un-ironically, a serious crime against nature.
Out of curiosity, I checked the steam reviews once the game was released, which only confirmed my expectations: the majority considered the game a cringy visual novel, with a small percentage actually praising the game for its funny humor and art direction. The most I can hope for these few people, is that they get the help they desperately need.
I personally hated this game, complete waste of time and energy. Let’s put it like this, I am disappointed that this is my first game that I suffered through to review. It isn’t worth the five dollars to play it, I wouldn’t touch it even if HACK_IT was free.
3/10
