Review Detail

My previous experience with hacker games consists entirely of my time playing Introversion's 'Uplink'. It was a superb indie game that became thoroughly addictive.

My second ever hacking game, exoSyphen's 'BS Hacker Unlimited' (which, I have to say, suffers from chronic bad naming syndrome) is not at all perfect. It is, however, compulsive - and once again generates the same feeling of satisfaction that Uplink did.

It feels altogether more mature than its earlier rival, forgoing the glitchy, but hollywood-stereotype-hacker interface for a slightly more 'real' feel. It's all worked through a console screen, where you type commands to solve the various problems you come across - there are really no 'graphics' to speak of. It's actually getting close to a text based adventure.

However, given the subject matter, this lack of graphical flare makes it feel authentic, like you're using some tools you downloaded off the internet to break into someone's computer somewhere. There is very little in the way of bleeping, pulsing buttons or lights to shatter the illusion that you are doing all this for real - whether it be breaking into school computers to delete your records, or re-building the internet after it fell to pieces.

However, it does feel limited. It may be because I'm not too far in, but it appears that every computer is broken into in the same way, and once there you can only download, upload, or delete files. You can't, for example, create your own programmes to retrieve information, or any of that other stuff you think about when you think of hackers.

Even so, they've got around this in a brilliant way. They're hoping to tap into the mod community that is just begging for games like these by making scenario and custom mission creation very, very easy. You can, quite literally, create your own story just by writing it out in wordpad and filling in some information that the programme will look for. I'm working on a story where you accidentally end up, through a long, complicated process, finding out God's email address. You can ask him the meaning of life, if you want. But I won't spoil it.

A really interesting game. Keep an eye out for this genre - it's fascinating.