[b]7/10[/b]
Program your drones to hack into servers and find out what happened with your brother.
[b]What is it:[/b] A mixture of programming, RPG, and rogue, an interesting combination that somehow works.
The story: In the near-ish future, your brother suddenly disappears, and your only hunch points you to his work as an engineer for a research company developing something secret. Good thing you're an expert hacker, so you deploy your drones to hack into servers and find out what really happened.
The gameplay: You get up to 3 drones that you can program using simple instructions like pick a target, move closer to it, attack it. Each server is presented as a tree of nodes, containing either enemy drones which you must defeat in order to get access to the next nodes up the tree, useful resources like upgraded drones, new instructions, or CPU, battery and weapon expansions, or emails that help you uncover the story. You can see exactly what drones you're facing, including their programming, so you can customize your drones for each battle. In the battle, each drone takes a turn and runs its program, until all the enemy drones are either destroyed or out of battery. Every time you open a server, you need to start hacking from scratch, which means that you don't have to hack it all at once if you're not yet powerful enough, but also that you'll have to rehack the same nodes over and over again, with the advantage that you can keep getting resources more than once.
In the story mode, you have to hack 5 servers of increasing difficulty, but there's a never-ending challenge mode too, with four different goals you can strive for: collect points from nodes, inflict damage, withstand damage, or use CPU cycles, which of course influence your programming strategy. If you pass a certain milestone, you get awarded a unique new feature, like better instructions, better weapons, or better drones.
What I liked: The concept is really interesting. I enjoyed programming my drones to wipe out the enemy drones, almost always in the first round before they even got a turn. I liked the more advanced commands you get later on, like "if enemy is at most two tiles away" or "if target has a shield", which would allow for some really interesting battle strategies, but sadly I didn't even get to use them. I liked the minimalist presentation.
What I didn't like: The game is too easy. The campaign is barely about 2 hours long, and you can beat it with just the basic commands. The infinite challenges could force you to come up with better strategies if you go deep enough, but the threshold for the rewards is usually reached around the 20th server, which is still early enough to require minimal effort.
[b]How hard is it:[/b] Easy to moderate.
[b]How long is it:[/b] 5 servers in story mode, doable in about two hours, and 4 challenges with 3 difficulty settings each, which could keep you busy for tens of hours if you get hooked.
[b]Level design:[/b] Decent, but a lot could be improved.
[b]Quality:[/b] Could be better. No proper steam integration. Minimalist UI, but that's not necessarily bad. Barely any settings. On the steamdeck the text is very hard to read. A few bugs.
[b]Worth the price:[/b] Almost, I really would like to see it improved a bit.
[b]Most positive aspect for me:[/b] Interesting combination of genres.
[b]Most negative aspect for me:[/b] Not challenging enough.
[b]What would make it better:[/b] Expand the campaign, and add a difficulty choice. The second part of the campaign could be about further exposing/punishing the bad company. Add achievements, cloud save, leaderboards, and workshop integration. Add a way to abandon the current hack, I would sometimes find out I forgot one move command which made the program run for a really long time until it failed, a quick abort would have really helped. Add a speedup button too, in the "Use CPU" challenge it would take minutes to run through a level, I don't want to have to wait that long. Make it worthwhile to go even further in the challenges; leaderboards could help, or increase the requirements for the four medals, or make the medals infinite. Make the "hard" challenges harder, perhaps have fewer/no omnicoins. Add a "blind" mode where you don't see beforehand what the level will look like. Add a "tournament" mode after beating the challenges, where you program your drones once and send them into battle wave after wave running on the same code, with awards given depending on how far you get. Newgame+: permadeath mode after you beat the story or a challenge, where you no longer have the option to retry a level. [b]Reword the "abort level" button[/b], I was sure it will end the challenge and I'd have to start from 0. Make the order in which drones are picked and which direction "closer" means more obvious and consistent. Add stored programs, I would often switch between several strategies depending on what kind of enemies I'm battling, and having to rewrite the same program over and over was a chore. Add a "clear program" button, more annoying than having to rewrite the program was having to clear the previous one command by command.
Bugs? The "Foreach friendly drone" command only works once per turn, e.g. nesting it inside another loop doesn't work, it only executes once. A few times I got my own drones to do friendly fire, instead of healing they attacked, and I'm pretty sure that wasn't intentional friendly fire. Speaking of intentional friendly fire, killing yourself leads to a deadlock.
[b]Also consider:[/b]
[url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/716490/EXAPUNKS/?curator_clanid=25928931]EXAPUNKS[/url], very similar drone programming game, but with actual code instead of simple codeblocks. Also, much better in terms of content and presentation, and much harder.
[url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/365450/Hacknet/?curator_clanid=25928931]Hacknet[/url], hacking game, but without the drones.
[url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/243970/Invisible_Inc/?curator_clanid=25928931]Invisible, Inc.[/url], hacking but with actual people instead of drones, and direct instead of preprogrammed actions.
[quote]For more puzzle game reviews, news and everything puzzle-related, follow [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/25928931-Puzzle-Lovers/]Puzzle Lovers[/url] and check out our [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/puzzlelovers]Steam group[/url].[/quote]
