Hacknet Review (⛧ KidKat ⛧)
So I've played the game a couple times through now, and I have some thoughts on it (and some pretty fun experiences).
The game is very fairly priced, and has a good portion of content with a good selection of paths you can take, though they all end up the same place, which possibly could be a turn-off. I've seen a couple bugs here and there, but it wasn't very difficult to deal with, or never long enough in where I dreaded to restart.
The story is really cool, albeit kind of easy to predict. It's very immersing though, and really gets going at a rapid pace. I enjoy it time and time again, and take my time to do the missions properly, although I know most of them and know which ones are "skippable".
Now, mechanics wise.. It gets kind of weird. It's very easy to get into, and you can pick it up and play the game to a finish "fairly" easily, but that's where it gets interesting. There's lots of small mechanics and tweaks you can make to the gameplay (renaming all but PortHack, having a trap shell set on yourself at all times, ect.), which ends out in you being able to dive deeper into it than just doing the base game. And if you enjoy collecting the different skins, then you have a lot of work to do (Looking at you, CCC hacksquad).
Now, onto the DLC.
The DLC brings a lot of things to the table. Instead of the mailbox, you're now in a chatroom with three other hackers. This leaves a door slightly open to get some really decent hints if you're stuck, and the general descriptions of the missions make it a lot easier to understand what you're doing when playing through the content for the first time. It also brings new mechanics, in that the ports will now be changing ever so often, without warning (though that's not much of a challenge, as long as you look at the port #'s before pressing enter, you're good). Now I do have a single warning though, if you haven't played through the DLC before.
Make sure to check if the CMD prompts are actual Windows prompts or in-game prompts. I got a scare when I had just worked my way through the prompt, only for my pc to reboot when i put in 'shutdown /r'. Just close the game, that's more than enough.
Overall, 9/10. Would've loved for some more content, and some bigger challenges. I was hoping the DLC would go the extra mile above the base game, but it sadly didn't. I can definitely recommend the game if you're looking for something different and something to puzzle yourself with. It requires a fairly keen eye.