Windows PC
Space Hack
By Nick Stewart
Feb 22, 2006, 5 :55 am

Given the sheer volume of hack-‘n’-slash titles currently sitting on store shelves, it takes something truly remarkable or noteworthy for any up-and-coming genre contenders to stand out in the crowd.  For example, Diablo 2 improved on the already brilliant foundations of its predecessor, whereas Dungeon Siege 2 moved things into a beautiful 3D realm along with a number of its own improvement.  With this in mind, Space Hack enters the fray as what can be referred to as one of the incredibly few non-fantasy-based 3D dungeon crawls on the market, using its sci-fi trappings as its claim to fame.

Plot is often a minor element in this particular genre, and Space Hack follows suit by providing a fairly minimal excuse to move you from one area to the next, annihilating whatever stands in your way.  As the titular Space Hack, you’re a hard-as-nails soldier who earned his colorful nickname when he once boarded a pirate ship and slaughtered all aboard using nothing more than a machete.  When the game picks up, however, you’re part of a mass exodus of humans who took to outer space in an attempt to colonize other planets; as you might imagine, an army of bloodthirsty aliens had other plans, boarded the vessel and started killing and eating humans, as they tend to do.  As the only truly combat-worthy person left on the entire massive ship, it’s up to you to carve your way through each of the ship’s many biospheres, ridding each of invaders in the most painful way possible.

Despite the ship’s apparently hopeless state of affairs, not all is lost; there’s still one rag-tag human-run base left, which serves as your jumping point to the game.  Much like any such base in any typical genre game, the outpost is fitted with various merchants who will happily sell you bigger and better weapons and armor, and will just as happily take excess goods off your hands.  The biggest complaint you’ll likely have in the early going will be related to these individuals, as the financial system seems to operate on some sort of curve.  You won’t be able to save much of your initial cash for the first few hours, instead being forced to spend it on healing devices, which you’ll go through in large quantities just to survive some of the tougher tank-like aliens which crop up all too frequently in each area.  This is only exacerbated by the fact that weapons and armor wear down with intensely unreasonable speed, forcing you to split your funds between keeping yourself decently equipped, and keeping yourself alive.  This creates some interesting tension, to be sure, but it takes away from the time-honored convention of using your hard-earned loot to obtain bigger and better items with which to take out the increasingly tough baddies you bump into as you progress.  It’s really frustrating and demoralizing when you can barely manage to grab enough loot to keep yourself alive for hours on end, which is a flaw in the economic system rather than in any particular gameplay mechanic.  This is especially true when you consider that there are a set number of enemies in a given area, indicated by a number in the corner of the screen which shrinks as you mow down your foes.  Because there is no respawning, you’re forced to move forward with whatever you have, and as you’re spending your cash on repairing both your items and your health, you’re forced to face off against tougher and tougher enemies with essentially the same low-end equipment you used for the starting area enemies.  That being said, you’ll eventually manage to reach a point where you’re acquiring more cash than you’re spending on medical items, and it feels as though you’ve achieved something significant when you do.

Combat is handled every bit as you’d expect, as your character is fully capable of using melee weapons such as clubs and swords, as well as ranged weapons such as rayguns and bows (which feel hideously anachronistic; honestly, why were these high-tech settlers keeping bows lying around?).  Even magic is roughly approximated in Space Hack through the use of “hi-tech”, which will eventually allow you to project decoy versions of yourself and automatically heal your character as you take damage.  Even the use of these combat items is all quite standard, with a series of simple mouse clicks enabling you to duke it out with any number of enemies in fairly short order.  Your ability to inflict damage with each and any of these will depend on a series of related stats which can be increased as you level up via the continued slaughter of your enemies.  It’s an incredibly simple and straightforward system, much more so than the Diablos and Dungeon Sieges of the day in that all of the additional skill trees and modifiers and so on are nowhere to be found.  Bumping your stats enable you to wield increasingly lethal weapons and/or more powerful tech, and that’s the extent of its complexity.  This return to a much more basic form puts a heavy emphasis on the straightforward hack-’n’-slash gameplay, which becomes fairly repetitious by the time you’ve moved onto your second or third biosphere.  Those who are likely to be interested in something like Space Hack are those who have been tinkering with variants on the Diablo formula for years now; with little more than the endless loop of attack-run-heal pattern to carry the gameplay, it’s conceivable that genre veterans will become fairly bored before long.

What helps Space Hack to stand out from the crowd is its use of the sci-fi setting.  Gamers have seen endless miles of goblin-infested forests, lizardman-heavy deserts and skeleton-occupied dungeons, and so any game that helps to introduce a new and interesting backdrop is certainly welcome.  In this respect, Space Hack is certainly successful, finally bringing dungeon-crawl action-RPGs into a futuristic environment.  As you first cast out from your base, you’ll notice the semi-natural confines of the first biosphere, with its mix of metallic walls and sparsely spread vegetation.  The floors are almost universally metallic as well, though there are enough patches of grass and the occasional series of plateaus and rolling hills to keep things visually interesting.  As you move onward, you’ll encounter different variations on this theme, including claustrophobic areas that feel like glorified air vents.  Other sci-fi conventions work their way into the game in the form of forcefields that need deactivating, alien spore pods that need destroying and technological items that need recharging.  This thematic shift from the genre norm is easily Space Hack’s greatest strength, and is the one area where the game possesses any real vestige of originality.  Years worth of fantasy gameplay help to make this new setting more than just a novelty, even if it is ultimately just a new coat of paint on a vehicle we’ve seen a million times before.  The strongly held atmosphere is enough to capture and maintain your interest, provided of course that you’re willing to overlook the simplistic repetition that lies at the heart of this particular game.

Just as its environmental and theme are a breath of fresh air, Space Hack’s graphics are fairly well done and manage to pull off some pretty decent stunts.  Although the majority of the game is shown in hues of spartan grays and browns, the texture work is strong and the modeling for the aliens is definitely worth a second look.  The animation is smooth and well done, and each of the alien types is distinct enough to be able to determine which is which at a distance.  It’s a nice touch that equipped items appear on your in-game character, though the vast majority of items are completely identical to one another in appearance, with only some different damage stats to distinguish each one.  This means that you’ll look virtually the same throughout most of the game, which detracts from the appeal of being able to alter your in-game appearance at all.  Interestingly, the camera can be rotated but not zoomed, which is probably just as well given that you’re often swarmed on all sides by aliens who attack from varying distances, so this isn’t a negative point.  To the game’s credit, it never chugs or slows regardless of how many enemies are on-screen.

Overall: 6.5/10

Space Hack manages to semi-successfully bring the increasingly tired hack-‘n’-slash genre into the future, and while it makes good use of its sci-fi setting, it sticks far too faithfully to the basics to really stand out from the crowd.  Even if you’re willing to slog through the initial 5-10 hours until the flawed economic system is no longer an issue, the lack of any real RPG complexity and generally simplistic approach highlights the game’s inherent repetition.  This isn’t to say the game isn’t any fun, of course.  Once you accept the game for what it is – and what it isn’t – there’s some enjoyment to be had from mowing down literally thousands of foes.  Space Hack sports an incredibly low price point at many online retailers, and $20 nets you nearly 100 hours of gameplay, though most of those hours will be spent repeating the same actions over and over.  Space Hack might be a cost-effective way of getting your fix, but if you haven’t already, you’re far better off snagging copies of Diablo 2 and Dungeon Siege 2 out of the used games bin.