During our discovery of indie games at Indie Games Play # 6, we were able to discover the game Chopping day a co-op stealth game.
Piece of Cake Studios is the studio that created Hacktag, it was founded very recently by three professionals in the field who all three combine 25 years of experience. Now seven people in their Parisian incubator, the studio focuses only on cooperative games which they want to make their core business.
Hacktag takes place in 2029 in a world close to ours but where you will meet anthropomorphic characters (the players will be foxes while the guards will be rhinos for example). The game is meant to be cooperative with two players where each will have a specific role:
- Fieldworker: he will have to sneak through the rooms to retrieve the information
- Hacker: he will have to thwart the traps and open the doors for the field agent
The levels will be managed randomly but always with certain mandatory mechanics such as hacking a certain PC or certain information to have. The objectives of the missions are quite simplistic but the main problem will come from your teammate. Indeed, even if the game can be managed in cooperation and in a normal way, the scoring aspect of the game with the theft of information can cause the players to shoot each other in order to be the first on the mission of infiltration.
During your infiltrations, you encounter enemies patrolling all over the place and wanting to capture you. There is no way to neutralize them in the long run like for example in Clandestine where you could just shoot them down. Only one solution has been revealed to us at the moment is that the hacker sends them sext or calls to distract them. In addition, the hacker can always open / close the doors to block their progress. Enemies work as in most games with a red sight area in front of them that you must not enter or get captured. There will also be shortcuts such as conduits to avoid them.
During your game, you can gain experience either by collecting lore-related items or by completing certain objectives. This experience will be used in part in the level you complete to give you certain talents that are useful for the mission. The other part will be used to increase your capacities for your other missions.
When you start the game, three characters related to your story will be randomly generated (a mentor, a sidekick and a damsel in distress). As in most games of this style, one of these three protagonists will become your nemesis and try to set traps for you.
To conclude, Hacktag is a really great game on paper. Having tested Clandestine some time ago, the gameplay of Hacktag is much more dynamic and the cooperative management is much better. It's a very promising title that I can't wait to try when it comes out at the end of 2016. You should know that its price is announced around 15Euros with the possibility of buying a dual-pack for about twenty euros. You should also know that HackTag won the best public prize in the Gameplay category at the Indie Games Play.
