Space Hack Review

Space Hack is a budget-priced action role-playing game. Now, I’m not sure about anybody else, but when I see the words “budget-priced”, I don’t expect a lot from a game. From my experience, the words (action role-playing game) usually don’t augur glad tidings, either. And so, suffice it to say, I wasn’t expecting a lot from Space Hack, and it didn’t fail to not deliver. Space Hack doesn’t have any bells or whistles. It doesn’t even know what bells and whistles are. The game doesn’t include voice acting, an interesting plot, a slick 3D engine, or even a personality. And yet, Space Hack is strangely playable, and that’s enough to save it.

In Space Hack, you take on the role of a soldier-type guy named… Space Hack. The game isn’t big on providing any sort of background information, but apparently you did some soldier-type stuff on Mars, and some people like you or dislike you because of it. At the start of the game, the colony ship that you’re on is swallowed by a black nebula, and all of the aliens living in the nebula decide to attack the ship so they can scavenge useful parts from it, or perhaps just so they can eat the humans on board. Since you’re a soldier-type guy, and since just about everybody else is dead, you’re sent out to deal with the threat.

As you might have guessed, Space Hack doesn’t have a complicated plot. The colony ship is made up of a big engine and 15 biospheres, but you don’t have any control over it, and so you have to make your way through the ship to the (mother module) where the escape pods are. This sequence might be the tutorial for a better game (yes, that’s a KotOR reference for those of you playing along at home), but in Space Hack that’s the entire campaign. The good news is that there are something like 10,000 nasty aliens inside the ship, and so you have to do some serious space hacking to win free.

Space Hack uses a classless system. You have to play as Hack, meaning you have to play as a male character, but everything else is determined by your four attributes — strength, dexterity, knowledge, and constitution. If you want to use melee weapons (like swords and axes) you need to build up your strength. If you want to use ranged weapons (like slings and (saw throwers)) you need to build up your dexterity. And if you want to use high-tech items (like energy weapons and holograms) you have to build up your knowledge. Constitution simply adds hit points.

However, unlike most other games that have a classless system, Space Hack doesn’t allow you to become the master of everything. Each time you gain a level, you receive five points to spend on your attributes, but the equipment in the game has attribute restrictions, and so if you want to use melee weapons, for example, you really have to concentrate on your strength so you can eventually use the good stuff. If you try to cover everything, you’ll just end up as some alien’s lunch.

In fact, it’s not just the character development system. The entire game is pretty well-balanced. Enemies remain challenging (but not too challenging) from start to finish, and enemies actually drop about as much money as you need to spend. After playing games like Dungeon Siege II and Fable, where you’re either given way too much money or else there’s an easy exploit for earning infinite money, it was nice to play a game where I had to decide if I could really afford a piece of equipment, factoring in both the purchase cost of the item and its expected repair costs (which are brutally high).

The combat system also works pretty well. Space Hack uses a standard Diablo interface where you left-click to do everything. If you left-click on the ground, then you move your character. If you left-click on an alien, then you attack it. If you hold down the left mouse button, then you either continue to move or continue to attack. This system was simple but effective in Diablo, and it’s simple but effective here as well.

The problem Space Hack has is that it doesn’t have anything going for it other than the combat. The campaign takes something like 60–80 hours to complete, but there are only 15 trivial side quests to go along with the main quest, there isn’t an interesting story to drive you along, the 15 biospheres all look about the same (and they’re drab and dull to boot), the equipment is disturbingly basic, and character development is pretty simple. If you want anything more than clicking and killing thousands of aliens, then you’re out of luck, because that’s all there is to the game.

And so I can’t really recommend Space Hack. It is inexpensive, easy to play, and competently constructed (I think it only crashed on me four times during the 60+ hours that I played it), but it’s also overly long and not very interesting. Space Hack is definitely the wrong type of game for people who actually want to roleplay in their role-playing games, but even for people who just want to click and kill things, I’d suggest similarly-priced titles like The Bard’s Tale and Heretic Kingdoms over Space Hack.