- This week, our App Army readers put their computer skills to the test in Anti-Hack
- The visuals were highly praised for their retro-inspired sensibility.
- However, the puzzles themselves made less of an impression on our reader.
Anti-Hack is a recently released puzzle game that draws inspiration from the old days of hacking. It has a lovely neon-drenched cyberpunk aesthetic and tasks you with fixing a corrupted computer system. Sounds like a tough job. One that our App Army is best suited for, so we handed the game over to them.
Here's what they thought:
Mike Lisagor
Anti-Hack is a trendy puzzle game with cool graphics, sound effects, and solid controls. Unfortunately, I have tried to play this game several times and I did not like it. I enjoyed the “hacking” storyline and was fascinated by the interface, but the gameplay was boring. There are series and series of binary puzzles to solve and short tutorials to guide you along the way.
You can go back and look at the training manual at any time. You are presented with screen after screen of puzzles that require you to press buttons to solve binary puzzles. As much as I love puzzle games, this one didn't “get me”, but some might find it more interesting than I did. I applaud the developer for a nice package overall, but not for me.
Bruno Ramalho
Well, let me just say that the trailer for the game is a little misleading. We see these cool 3D images and you might think that we are entering a completely different game. Putting that aside, yes, that is what happens here. This game is a logic game. I like to solve puzzles and that is exactly what we get. Logic puzzles to solve.
Or binary puzzles. If you like computers and programming, maybe you don't need to go to the help page (or the legend page) that much, and you can solve these puzzles very quickly. But if you don't like them, maybe you'll check that legend a couple of times during your gaming sessions.
To fix the compromised computer system, you have to solve these binary puzzles, touching the buttons to make connections to activate the transistors, and for that, you have to follow the rules of AND, OR connections and all the variations. Nice music and nice visuals between the puzzles, but that's about it. You could spend more time watching the animations between the puzzles than playing it. This game didn't grab me.
Torbjorn Kamblad
I used to be a bit of a hacker. Not a good hacker, but I was part of the warez scene in the early days of the internet. I also liked to hack my Xbox using a computer. It might look cool, but it was really slow and boring. I had high hopes for a faster and yes, cooler experience in Anti-Hack.
But I was wrong. This game is a simple logic puzzle, with some of the slowest level transitions I've ever seen. I was looking forward to seeing DNS, IP, and other computer terms. Instead, I got and/or. My younger days in the scene were nicer, and I had 2GB of RAM with a Pentium 166 processor.
Roberto Maine
In Anti-Hack you must explore a corrupted network by solving puzzles that use arrangements of logic gates to illuminate all the squares in a level. Levels become increasingly complex as you progress through the game, with some levels having a limited amount of moves you can make.
The 3D sections are just there for transitions, as the core of the game is solving logic gate puzzles, and graphically they wouldn't look out of place on an 8-bit micro. In the early levels, you can get away with trying all the logic gate configurations, but when you reach the limited moves level, you really have to read the instructions. A well-presented puzzle game, playable but nothing special.
My friend Jason Rosner
Anti-Hack is a 3D puzzle game where you have to decode binary logic to restore a corrupted computer system. One of my favorite parts of this game was its overall aesthetic vibe. I felt like I was transported back to the 90s and the music, which is awesome, so turn it up, made me feel like I had entered the cyberpunk world of The Matrix. Graphically everything fits together perfectly.
The puzzles start out very easy, but become more challenging as you progress through the levels. While there are helpful tutorials to help you along the way, I thought someone with computer programming knowledge would feel much more at home here. However, I found Anti-Hack interesting enough to pique my curiosity about the cyber world. Those interested in the genre will find a lot to like here.
Oksana Ryan
This game is about solving binary puzzles on a hacked computer. There are tutorials at the beginning of each new intersection, explaining the sequences needed to solve the subsequent puzzles. Although I could see a solution to the sections for a while, I felt this was a game best suited for someone who fully understood the intricacies of computer programming.
At times, I found that some of the puzzles were solved more by luck than by actually seeing the final conclusion. The background music was good and the graphics were simple. I like a good puzzle game, but this one was just a little slow and at times random for my taste, although I think players with binary computer knowledge would be in their element.
Abukoff scores
What I liked the most is the aesthetics and the binary logic puzzles that start out very simple and eventually get harder. And you end up with limited moves (with help available, thankfully). It's a nice challenge but also inevitably a source of frustration for me. I don't know much about the binary world of computers, and it's possible I could have gotten more out of this if I had. As it stands, it's an interesting idea for a puzzle game with a cool atmosphere that's fun, even if it doesn't necessarily rise very far above the rest. Fans of the genre should enjoy it.
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