Black Ice

          I like to think of Black Ice as FPS Hacker. And that’s what it is. You walk around in what can only be described as visualized cyberspace. There are buildings, all with different, interesting names like “X-People Inc,” “LaserHand Industries,” “Axiscom Mechanics Inc,” and the final, Boss building, “Finality Incorporated.” Your ultimate goal is to hack this winning you  the game. The actual hacking is very interesting. You go up to building, and activate your IceBreaker, which initiates the hack. You then have to wait for the hack to complete, which takes anywhere from ten seconds to a minute and a half, depending on the building difficulty level, which is displayed next to its name, and the level of your IceBreaker and Hack Speed skill, which I will get into later. Once the hack begins, anti-virus starts spawning. The (so far) three types of anti-virus are the normal spiders that follow and attack you, the head crab spiders that jump up high and on top of you, and the floating squid type enemies that shoot lasers at you. If you hack the building and kill all of the enemies, you are rewarded with randomized loot.

          Killing enemies and successfully hacking buildings gets you EXP, which brings me to the skill progression window. When you level up, you get skill points that you can spend on quite a few things. You can upgrade your health, hack time, RAM (the stuff you use to perform actions), and several other things. You need these things if you are going to successfully hack Finality Incorporated or defeat S.H.A.R.K. S.H.A.R.K. is the boss enemy that spawns around Finality Incorporated. He is basically a flying shark of death. That shoots player seeking missiles. And has a huge amount of health. And drops awsome loot. You can even ride S.H.A.R.K. You just need to teleport or jetpack onto his back and he is no longer aggressive. You can actually hack buildings while on his back.

          There are a lot of things that work really well for this game, and only a few that don’t, mostly solvable. Here is a rundown of what worked and what didn’t

What Worked

          Black Ice is built on one of the most interesting concepts I’ve seen in video games. The idea of a first person hacking is truly individual. You can use spiders, enemy seeking mines, scopes, “hats” which give you a passive bonus, and other things to assist in your hacking. Larger companies have better hacking protection. I could go on, but I won’t so there is room for the other things this game does well. Things like S.H.A.R.K. He is very menacing, flies around with a sense of smugness, and even has his own sound track. If you intend to hack Finality Incorporated, you need to take him out first, as he is very difficult to kill.

          Another thing that I liked was how the enemies use a variety of tactics, and quite often force you to adjust yours. Enemies will drop mines, spit acid, and swarm together to provide new challenges. If you normally run around and shoot, you are susceptible to mines. If you hide in a corner you are susceptible to acid spitting. And if you hide on a roof of a nearby building, a large swarm of spiders can climb all four sides of your tower and make quick work of you. This is why a variety of tactics are required.

Something else that made this game really enjoyable is how the difficulty scales to your skill level. Once you play for a while, the level 3 to 5 towers are incredibly easy to get through, while at the beginning of the game they were a challenge. This creates a good sense of progression. And there are always buildings that will challenge you. There are plenty of buildings with difficulties between the beginning level 3 towers to Finality Incorporated’s 500 level difficulty.

What Didn’t Work

          For all the things that did work in this game, there are lots of things that didn’t. Fortunately, Black Ice’s problems are all fixable. One main thing that bugged me was the lack of motivation. There is no story. Granted, that is added when a game is concept 

perfect and being polished, but it’s necessary in a game like this. There needs to be a reason to hack Finality Incorporated, and the other buildings are simply practice, or something of that sort.

          There are some other things that I didn’t like. The weapon stats menu is overly complex. I ranked items based solely on their cost, because all of the stats were too confusing. I also had a problem with the UI. I get where the style is coming from, but I found it to be unpolished and, I hate to say, ugly. The upgrade system seemed to be quite redundant. I only upgraded four things, hack speed, health, RAM, and RAM recharge time. And you don’t level up enough in the time it takes to defeat Finality Incorporated, so there is no point investing in the other things. I also thought there should be more integration with the hacking concept, although I’m not sure that would be possible without sacrificing game play. My final qualm with Black Ice is how S.H.A.R.K. becomes very easy to defeat later on, allowing the player to farm the loot you get for killing him. S.H.A.R.K.’s health should increase with the level of the player.

          There are some other minor things wrong with Black Ice, but like the things above, all are easily fixed. And so, this brings me to my conclusion.

Conclusion

          Black Ice is a concept-sound game. There are no major problems with the gameplay and I expect it to do quite well. Considering it’s a free Alpha right now, I would completely recommend picking it up (Dev links below). Because there are no major gameplay problems, this game gets my Good Potential rating.

Dev Info

Website: http://superdupergc.com/

Dev’s Twitter: @BlackIceTheGame

 

My Twitter: @Moxyle