Hackmud started off well with an interesting story for the tutorial. But, once you exit the tutorial you're thrown into a world of hell. The story of the tutorial is now non-existent and most of the things you learned in the tutorial don't apply to the main game.

Without a walk through or someone to hold your hand you'll most likely never find any t1 npcs let alone t2 npcs.
Most "Locks" in the game require you to guess the answers and some even require outside knowledge that you'll need to google and then combine that data with a good guess.


====The Community====
The community isn't dead but it's very small and new players usually leave just as quickly as they join since the community fails to provide real answers to some real questions. Instead the community provides more riddles and "hints" to new players making for a very frustrating experience.


====The UI====
This is a CLI (Command Line Interface) game. Meaning the text UI should be clutch and perfect to use however, the game fails to do that as well. Copying and Pasting text is hard since you can't hold down shift and use the arrows keys to copy text. Instead you need to use the good old click and drag with the mouse. The issue? The copy box bounces around making it almost impossible to grab text quickly and if you copy some white space the command, once pasted into your terminal, will execute immediately. You also have a scratch pad that's used for note taking. The issue? once you past text into it, in about 1 hour if you past more text it'll overlap with the original text. This can really screw you up if you have valuable information in there since you need to delete both to clear it.


====The Coding====
Let's move to the JavaScript coding part that everyone brags about. First off, there is no documentation on how to use JS with the game effectively. Basic commands from JS don't work in this game and the syntax is slightly different from what we use today. I believe the game uses ES6 although I could be wrong on that one.
If you think you can use this game to learn JS then you're in for a surprise.
Learning JS with this game is like learning CSS using bootstrap (It doesn't work).
Since the game has no documentation or the documentation it has is outdated, this essentially ruins the coding part of the game unless you're willing to spend the next 4 weeks experimenting and asking around on discord. If you're looking for a game that can teach you programming this isn't it and I recommend you spend your money on an actual course.


====Game Flow & Progression====
Finding your first t1 npc in the main game is impossible without help from either: a player made script, A game walk-through or, a player willing to help and not bs you around and then steal your "lock" later on which makes your entire account essentially dead.

As you increase your level it takes longer to kernel hardline. (kernel hardline is used to hack accounts). No hardline, no money. No money, no game play. This will force you to make a script with the horrible documentation and if you can't then you're out of luck.

In order to find a t2 npc you literally have to luck upon a secret member access portal for employees of a corporation and you need to be smart enough to realize that the names of the employees are listed in the .public area of the corporation (which is filled with about 50-80 columns of text that fill your entire screen).

Once you have the member access then you need to find. Guess what.... a QR code that requires the colors to be Inverted and the background color as well. So you'll need some external screenshot software. external image editing software. and a QR Code reader or write a script to do all of that (good luck).


====Conclusion====
Too many bugs.
Community isn't helpful enough to compensate for the horrible tutorial that teaches you almost nothing.
Game flow is impossible without the help of google or the community (or maybe if you have 160 IQ)
No documentation for code interfacing into the game.

Not worth 22 dollars.
If you're looking for a hacking simulator that's challenging with better documentation take a look at grey hack. It still has lots of flaws and not much content but in terms of a hacking simulator it's better (still in beta). Personally if you're trying to learn programming you should just avoid most of these "Hacking Games" and buy a programming course along side an IT
course that interests you.


I really tried to give this game a good shot but in the end I've become fed up with the horrible non-existent code documentation. I have quite a bit of JS coding experience and still couldn't figure it out. Sadly I wouldn't recommend this game to any one.