Hacker Evolution comes with a series of ten missions (including a tutorial) where you’re trying to repair the damage to the world economy reaped by some evil hackers. The gameplay consists of typing in commands to scan for new servers, gain access to those servers, and obtain valuable information. The usual slew of basic Unix commands are present (cat, del, ls, exec) for file and directory manipulation. Before gaining access to a new server, you must decrypt the key and crack the password, both of which are done by using the appropriate command line entries. After you can access, you can transfer funds from their account and download and upload files.

If you have gained complete access to a server by decrypting them and crack all the ports, you can bounce links through them that will increase the time before you get traced (discovered) by the host. You don’t lose the game if you are traced, only if your global trace level reaches 100%. With the money you “earn,” you can decrease your global trace level (10% for every $500) or purchase new equipment that can increase trace time, decrease download time, or increase processing speed for cracks and decryptions. Using cash to decrease your trace level is an odd, unrealistic dynamic that doesn’t really make any sense.

The puzzles themselves are very well designed. Although you’ll generally be doing the same thing each mission (finding specific files and copying or deleting them), there are almost always multiple paths to victory. There are little clues scattered around each of the servers (mostly on ports you don’t need to access) that can unlock new servers you don’t necessarily need to win, but they provide an alternate way of getting your required information. Plus, it’s fun to look through restricted information (virtually speaking, of course). You need to find a good balance between the trace increases you’ll get from cracking these options servers, though, as accessing that new server might not be worth the amount of money you’ll need to spend to decrease your trace level back down to reasonable levels. Money is also scarce in the game and most servers don’t have any. You can, I discovered, transfer a small amount of money and not get traced instead of all of it at once. Ha! I hacked a game about hacking! You can’t save in the middle of a mission, but that isn’t really realistic and most of the levels only take about half an hour (or less) to complete. With only nine levels (plus the tutorial), Hacker Evolution is over far too quickly. Luckily, the game support mods for those who want to figure out what the simple text files and directory structures mean.

Hacker Evolution is not without its problems. The penalty for cracking passwords is way too brutal. The game forces you do to this on pretty much every level, and you’re given a 15% increase in global trace level no matter how close they were to tracing you. Half a second from being traced? 15% penalty. Forty-five seconds from being traced? 15% penalty. This makes no sense. Even worse, your global trace rating carries over from level to level; since you’ll be required by the game to start each new puzzle by cracking (a 15% penalty) and decrypting (which carries a 5% penalty) new servers, if you ended the previous level with more than about a 70% trace level, you might as well start the entire game over from scratch. This means starting a new puzzle costs you at least $2000 in cash right off the bat to offset your global trace increases from cracking and decrypting (and more money is needed as you progress through the level). The money in the game is so scarce that reducing your trace level will deplete all of the futile cash you had leaving hardly any room for computer upgrades. This is a fixable problem, but it means that almost everyone won’t be able to complete the game if they crack one more server than needed. It’s too bad that the game is so difficult, since the remainder of the gameplay is very solid and quite enjoyable.