Hack 'n' Slash

1. VoiceOfTheOdd

   Sep 28, 2014

   10

   I wanted to start of by saying Hack 'n' Slash has the incredible concept and art direction which I have come to expect from Double fineI wanted to start of by saying Hack 'n' Slash has the incredible concept and art direction which I have come to expect from Double fine studios. When I first heard about Hack 'n' Slash, it was during Double Fine's in house "Amnesia Fortnight" game jam. The amnesia fortnight is a tradition of double fine which has brought on some really interesting games such as costume quest, the cave, and space base. While I will admit the tradition can be frustrating when it breaks up a team working on a larger game like "Broken Age"(which may have been inspired by past game jams), thus slowing production, however the fortnight event keeps the creativity in their studio flowing and provides motivation for the designers to keep making inventive games for us to enjoy (so we should promise not to complain). The Game itself is a legend of zelda-esque dungeon puzzler, but instead of the ever-present block pushing puzzles which are so indicative of the genre it is made up of puzzles based off of lua script coding. According to the developers, the game is still a little bit of a work in progress, given the complaints of difficulty on the later portions of the game I feel that this statement is corroborated. The latter half of the game has a steep increase in difficulty of code primarily due to the open-ended-ness of the game itself. While it may sound like lazy coding, the designers still wanted to keep the open endedness and difficulty to foster a community rather than hinder it. The intent of the game is to bring together veteran-coders, fledgling designers and script kitties to create a community similar to that of any game design group to foster creativity and modification to take what is already there and make something more. I personally feel that if t succeeds, this game will be an important point in gaming history when developers learn to let their audience collaborate with them on an even deeper level. I give this game a high review for aiming high, and suggest it to anyone even slightly interested in any form of programming. I want as many people as possible to play this game so that the community can grow and build something history-making out of something already beautiful.… Expand

   • 3 of 7 users found this helpful
2. Zulgot

   Sep 15, 2014

   9

   One of the best puzzle games I have ever played. The game has unique concept and gameplay elements, very nice artwork and awesome music.One of the best puzzle games I have ever played. The game has unique concept and gameplay elements, very nice artwork and awesome music. Puzzles requires some basic coding abilities, but even if you are complete newbie in coding, game will teach you everything in entertaining way. In the end of the game, you will be able to change the core code of the game! In many situations, you are limited only by your imagination :)… Expand

   • 4 of 11 users found this helpful
4. Dozey

   Sep 23, 2014

   7

   Personally I greatly enjoyed the game. It has puzzles that will provide a reasonable enough challenge for anyone remotely familiar with codePersonally I greatly enjoyed the game. It has puzzles that will provide a reasonable enough challenge for anyone remotely familiar with code vulnerability exploitation or who is reasonably competent at coding. It's excellent at teaching the things required in it's own unique way. Learning these skills could be very difficult for someone who either has trouble thinking in a critical way about circumventing the rules or for people who have no experience with computer languages.
   
   Basically if the knowledge gap, either the one in act 4 or the one in act 5 are not too severe it will likely be one of the more fun games you've played. If it's too severe it will be a nightmare and more like homework or copying other's solutions to the problems.… Expand

   • 4 of 5 users found this helpful
5. fredhorrigan

   Sep 19, 2014

   3

   Remember Broken Age?
   or Massive Chalice?
   Nice to know that Double Fine has enough time to crank out stuff nobody asked for instead of theRemember Broken Age?
   or Massive Chalice?
   
   Nice to know that Double Fine has enough time to crank out stuff nobody asked for instead of the stuff people paid them to make.
   
   Kotick was right.… Expand

   • 3 of 17 users found this helpful
6. rpundurs

   Sep 21, 2014

   2

   After a promising start, this game becomes totally impenetrable very quickly. The presentation of scripts and algorithms is completelyAfter a promising start, this game becomes totally impenetrable very quickly. The presentation of scripts and algorithms is completely incomprehensible and not helped by a nauseating "glitchy" overlay that flickers across the screen randomly, obscuring varying amounts of objects and text. I'm not sure what they were thinking with this one, and it's definitely not worth the price.… Expand

   • 2 of 5 users found this helpful
7. thepalatinepoet

   Oct 29, 2014

   1

   Do not buy this game. This is not the programming game you want to buy. It is not worth the money, and it is not currently, by my standards, aDo not buy this game. This is not the programming game you want to buy. It is not worth the money, and it is not currently, by my standards, a finished puzzle game, much less one that teaches any reasonable amount of programming.
   
   It is a a beautiful idea for a game, and a very clever title for the idea. But it is not the game the idea would suggest exists. If you must buy it, wait for the game that purports to teach programming to at least be itself adequately programmed. That is not the game that is available right now.
   
   Hack 'n' Slash is a game in which you swing your USB sword to, instead of slaying things, set their hit points to 0. I can offer no higher praise for the integration of the "hacking" in the game for the first few minutes of gameplay. Instead of attacking the turtle, you hack its allegiance so it becomes your ally. Instead of finding the right order of blocks to push for a block pushing puzzle, you simply hack the number of remaining pushes allowed for one block. Reprogramming the movement of the guards was hilarious.
   
   Then, just as quickly as the fun begins, the clever puzzle design disintegrates.
   
   The coding is still painfully inaccessible and unserviceable—if you're a programmer, it's boring and tedious for no apparent reason, and if you're not a programmer, there's no chance you'll really even understand the puzzle as it's presented. As an experienced programmer, putting together the clues using detailed understanding of how programming generally works got me through the "programming puzzles", but left me painfully frustrated by how obtuse they were guaranteed to be for someone who didn't automatically know that "HackBlock 1" is probably the same in-game object as "blocks[1]". I see no reason to relate a red letter 'a' directly to a red diamond symbol other than educated guesswork. A game which requires trial and error is fine, but a game that requires too much backtracking between trials and crashes when you don't know what you're doing is not a game that encourages learning.
   
   The most frustrating thing for me was when I immediately saw the solution the programmers intended, but also that there were far more obvious and trivial solutions. If, instead of entering the prescribed passwords into locked gates, you decided to simply change the assign value from "false" to true, for instance, you bypass the intended lesson entirely. Not only are the puzzles poorly thought out, they don't even enforce the intended lesson. I can't imagine anything other than inexperienced players blundering their way through the "puzzles."
   
   The game crashes when the built-in LUA interpreter falls apart, because instead of being a sandboxed interpreter, the game runs code you throw at it natively, and I wouldn't surprised if the game wasn't a legitimate security vulnerability for getting admin access to the local machine. What's worse, the programming conventions used are distracting, if not outright confusing. The variables that are useful to hack aren't even always next to the lines of code they relate to, requiring mundane back calculation or walking around to find the right variable.
   
   And now we get to the rest of the game. As far as adventure games go, this game isn't even half-baked: shoddy collision detection make movement a confusing dance, total lack of information on what can and can't be done makes even thinking about solutions total guesswork, and there is quite honestly no way to know what the next step is for any part of the game. Aimless roaming is practically a necessity, and the "infinite woods" which don't even tell you you're running in circles are certainly not making it any easier. Even after you solve the puzzle of the infinite woods, there's no guide to tell you where to go when you leave them. Nothing is named in a useful fashion, nothing is provided. There's invariably way too much information available as "clues," and the player has no idea what's useful and what's just there because the programmers thought it would be cool. I spend so much time wading through unnecessary details for reasons I don't understand to solve puzzles that aren't even intellectually challenging so much as they are a series of inside jokes. The final puzzles aren't so much arcane wizardry as they are exercises in variable tweaking, and there's not even any guide to explain which variables should really be tweaked to start with. Behaviors not explained before or after a particular puzzle are used and so players shouldn't even know to try the things the developers expect us to know.
   
   As someone who actually studied computer science, incidentally, I take offense at what the game so loosely refers to as algorithms. None of the implementations are meaningfully quantifiable algorithms.
   
   This is not a programming game. This is not a well-programmed game. And what's worse, this is not even a good game. I'd save your money if I were you.… Expand

   • 4 of 5 users found this helpful
8. alexander_clark

   Mar 11, 2021

   0

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