App Army Assemble: Anti-Hack - "Does this puzzler make you feel like an old-school hacker?"

• 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 sensibilities
• However, the puzzles themselves impressed our reader less

Anti-Hack is a recently released puzzler that draws inspiration from the old-school hacking days. It has a delightful neon-soaked cyberpunk aesthetic and tasks you with fixing a corrupted computer system. That sounds like a tough job. One that our App Army is best suited to, so we handed the game over to them.

Here's what they thought: 

Anti-Hack is a fashionable puzzle game that has snazzy graphics, sound effects, and solid controls. Unfortunately, I tried to get into this game several times and I just didn’t enjoy it. I appreciated the “hacking” storyline and was captivated by the interface, but the gameplay was dull. There are series after series of binary puzzles to solve, and brief tutorials that guide you along the way.

You can go back and look at the training manual whenever you want. You then are presented with screen after screen of puzzles that involve pressing buttons to solve the binary puzzles. As much as I love puzzle games, this just didn’t “hook” me but some may find this more interesting than I did. I commend the developer for a nice package overall, just not for me.

Well, let me just say that the trailer for the game is a little bit misleading. We see these awesome 3D visuals, and one could think that we're going into a completely different game. Putting that aside, yes, this is what happens here. This game is a logic game. I like to solve puzzles, and that's exactly what we get. Logical puzzles to solve.

Or binary puzzles. If you're into computers and programming, perhaps you don't need to go for the help page (or legend page) that much, and you can solve these puzzles very quickly. But if you're not, perhaps you are going to be checking that legend a few times during your gaming sessions.

To fix the compromised computer system you need to solve these binary puzzles, touching the buttons to establish the connections to activate the transistors, and for this, you need to go by the rules of the AND, OR connections, and all the variations. Nice music, and nice visuals between puzzles, but that's it. You could spend more time watching the animations between puzzles than actually playing them. This game didn't grab me.

I used to be somewhat of a hacker back in the day. Not a good one, but part of the warez scene in the early days of the internet. I also enjoyed hacking my Xbox using a computer. It might sound cool, but it was really slow and boring. I had high hopes for a speedier, and yeah a cooler experience in Anti-Hack.

I was wrong though. This game is your basic logic puzzle game, with some of the slowest level transitions I have seen. Was looking forward to DNS, IP and other computer terms. Instead, I got and/or. My youth days in the scene were cooler, and I had 2 gigs of RAM with a Pentium 166 processor.

In Anti-Hack you must explore a corrupted network by solving puzzles that use arrangements of logic gates to light all the square boxes on a level. The levels get increasingly complex as you get further into the game with some levels having a limited amount of moves you can make.

The 3D sections are there just for transitions as the meat of the game is solving logic gate puzzles and graphically these wouldn’t look out of place on an 8-bit micro. On the early levels, you can get away with trying all the logic gate configurations but when you reach the limited moves level you really need to read the instructions. A nicely presented puzzle game, playable but nothing special.

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Anti-Hack is a 3D puzzler where you are decoding binary logic to restore a corrupted computer system. One of my favourite parts of this game was its whole aesthetic vibe. I felt like I was transported back to the 90s, and the music— which is fantastic, so turn it up— made me feel as if I had stepped into the cyberpunk world of The Matrix. Graphically everything fits perfectly. 

The puzzles start you off very easy, eventually working up to a greater challenge as you progress through the levels. While there are helpful tutorials which will assist you along the way, I felt that those with computer programming skills would feel much more at home here. Still, 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.

This game is about solving binary puzzles on a hacked computer. There are tutorials at the beginning of each new junction, explaining the sequences required to solve the upcoming puzzles. Although for some of the time I could manage to see a solution to the sections, I did feel it was a game best played by someone who fully understood the intricacies of computer programming.

On occasions, I found that some of the puzzles were solved more by luck than actually seeing the end conclusion. The background music was good and the graphics were simple. I enjoy a good puzzling game but this was just a little slow and at times random for my taste, though I feel that gamers with computer binary knowledge would be in their element.

What I liked most about this is the aesthetic and the binary logic puzzles that start off very simply and eventually get more difficult. And you find yourself with limited moves (with help available, fortunately). That’s a good challenge but also inevitably a source of frustration for me. I don’t know too much about the binary world of computers, and it’s possible I might have gotten more out of this if I had. As it is, it’s an interesting idea for a puzzle game with a cool vibe to it that is fun, even if it doesn’t necessarily rise far above the rest. Fans of the genre ought to enjoy it.

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Anti-Hack