RVL Hacker Demo

Hacking involves much more than mashing buttons on your keyboard very quickly, as it is usually portrayed in TV shows and movies. In fact, a lot of it involves patience and caution, since one of the most common ways you can break into something is by taking advantage of an exploit. However, it takes time to check for exploits, although even then you must find one that allows you to do exactly what you need.

RVL Hacker is all about the classic view on hackers, since it reinforces some stereotypes when it comes to what it is exactly that they do. In essence, most of the gameplay revolves around you writing ‘crack’ into a terminal-looking window and waiting for the simulated brute-force program to do its job. Naturally, there is more to it than that, but the repetition can quickly make you drop the game entirely.

As far as the story is concerned, it talks about a guy named Alex D., who works for a software company and he is quite skilled in the art of computers. During his off hours, he entertains himself by finding vulnerabilities in company systems, but the entire backfires on him when he mistakes one such company for the NSA and he gets caught. Naturally, he avoids prison by being offered a job at the NSA and participate in secret missions for the organization.

When it comes to the actual gameplay, there’s not much you can do, other than type a few generic commands into a console, such as ‘crack’, ‘connect’, or the like. Things are definitely not very realistic and it would appear that the preferred audience are people who never had any contact with a computer. Thankfully, some of the missions feature interesting puzzles, but not even that can keep you interested for too long.

The downside is that there are no graphics to distract you either, except for a simple map on which your position and the servers you are currently connected to are displayed. Everything else is black or filled with repetitive text, which can greatly contribute to the overall boredom factor. As a small bonus, you can at least create your own levels and missions, but you still have to use the same ludicrous commands, so that’s not very helpful either.

In the end, RVL Hacker does not really manage to capture the idea of hacking, nor does it make it so the experience is at least fun, if not accurate. Thus, unless you have no clue about computers and you do not get frustrated at phony-techy stuff, you’d be better off playing something else.