PC Game Review :: Street Hacker! 8/10

PC Game Review :: Street Hacker! 8/10
Posted :: Jun 17, 2004 by Haggs

Street Hacker
Author: Dahitokiri
Publisher: VirtuWeb
Genre: Simulation

Welcome to my first article on Absolute Insight. As you can see from the title, the game is titled “Street Hacker.” Neither the game nor the publisher, VirtuWeb Interactive, are very well known in the gaming world, but that doesn't make this a bad game. Far from it, in fact.

This nice little snazzy menu allows you to go to various sites and update the game, as well as other options.

The character creation screne, where you choose your strength, intelligence, dexterity, and what you look like. You'll learn about the stats as you progress through the game.

The game puts you in the role of a street hacker, who is then recruited by an organization and given the tools necessary to aid other companies in gaining hold of their specific market for some monetary reward, of course. The game works by throwing you into a tutorial and giving you some beginner's levels to introduce the way of the game and after those levels you are to buy weapons (yes, guns), phreak boxes, and laptops to help you infiltrate buildings from which you will plunge into the digital world. Just like other games with a similar premise, every mission that you complete successfully will allow you to buy better equipment, software, and travel to different cities.

From here you can access the various parts of your computer, such as the email, explorer, terminan and virus creator.

This is where most of the hacking takes place, along with the launching of your virii and the manipulation of your routing tables.

Graphics-wise the game isn't too impressive, but then again, it doesn't have to be. This game is a classic case of playability and plot vs. eye-candy graphics. The game has just the amount of graphics as it needs, and those graphics look nice for a game of such low funding and scale.

All your virii will be created here, and allow for various options that affect speed, stealth, and general effectiveness.

Locations such as the downtown and airport can be accessed from here, along with a copy of the latest newspaper.

You can travel to many cities from here, for a small fee. Different cities have different amount of protections for their various buildings.

The game itself has hardly more of a story than your typical FPS, ie, Half-Life, UT 2k4. Rather, it has a lot of small missions that affect other missions in the game. It also has a lot of choices as to the kind of virii one can make, the buildings one infiltrates, and the weapons one buys. This scope for variety really raises the playability of the game a good degree.

Ratings on a scale from 1 (awful) to 10 (amazing):
Gameplay 8/10
- There is some good representation of what it is like to handle a terminal, but unfortunately it seems to use very much of a simplified and windows use of commands, like using the \ for directory structures instead of / like in every other OS. The software and script representation are good for anyone that doesn't know what real hacking is like or the time that it takes.

Graphics 7/10
- The graphics score is low just beause there isn't much of it, but, like I said above, the game doesn't really need any more than it already has and what it does, it does well.

Sound 6/10
- The sound and music is one thing I don't really like much about this game. It just doesn't suit the hacking world. However, if you can stand the music, the game has a good built-in playlist that you can play.

Replay Value 9/10
- With all the different routes one can take in the Street Hacker, along with custom missions that ne can make with the Mission Designer, the game is sure to keep you entertained for a long while.

Overall 8/10
- Street Hacker is basically the first of its kind in this underground genre, and as such it's going to have a few quirks in it. But there is a lot of promise for any future generations of such games.

Links:
Street Hacker

Thanks to Absolute Insight member Dahitokiri for writing this review!