Recent reviews by すみません

I really wanted to like this. I work in information security and have a love of hacker sims going back to Uplink circa 2001. The UI is really clean and immersive, building a full window manager and all of that extra polish had to take years. My gripes are mostly in the minutiae of the shell and edge behaviors.

First, let's clarify, this is much more a puzzle game with hacker flavor than a CTF simulation. That's not really clear from the description, and it apparently gets closer to reality the farther you go, seeing things like sqlmap listed as late-game activities. But if you're already pretty advanced in this stuff, it's going to be difficult to muster the enthusiasm to get there when you could just...do an actual CTF instead, often for free.

Second, the terminal. The pseudo-OS they've built has some odd behavior with the window manager that really becomes an annoyance. The text selection is finicky, the same command you're typing in persists across all open tabs which kinda defeats the purpose, the tab-autocompletion almost never works (this is a huge gripe), pipes don't work, many common commands (cd, ls, cp, mv for starters) behave differently to UNIX-like shells, and that probably contributes to the puzzle-game feel of it, because I'm not actually in my comfort zone here, I'm using strange things that sometimes resemble what I want to do and sometimes I'm just fighting with their new syntax. The area to get the prompt to be active is very small and switching to it from keyboard is either unintuitive or unavailable. There's also no intuitive system for automating things like iterating over filenames due to the lack of pipe support.

Third, the browser is a great idea on paper, but this implementation is pretty horrendous. It doesn't take much mouse input, and doesn't take much keyboard input. I just ended up using the steam overlay's browser instead, and eventually just windowed the game so I could use an actual browser.

Fourth, the media player is very spotty on when it wants to play music, causing long periods with no sound. Minor compared to the other things, but I think it hurts the immersion.

Fifth, the game is apparently at end of support despite being launched only about 18 months ago, so the four points above are likely to remain valid whenever you happen to read this.

All in all I'm not sure what to make of CHAQS. Actually getting started with hacking is probably easier than this game, but being good at this game doesn't get you as far with hacking as spending the same amount of time just learning to hack would. You'll have to unlearn a lot of what the game teaches you because it doesn't function the same way in the real world. You'll learn about some ciphers that you'll never use again. You'll get into steganography which won't have any usage outside of these puzzles. Those things are neat. They're not hacking, they're only vaguely CTF.

If you want to get into hacking from nothing, do exactly that. Try your hand at actual CTFs, preferably ones that are guided and start from very little expectations. If you're beginner to intermediate, this is going to give you a fair amount of bad advice. If you're experienced, the differences between this and the real world are probably going to frustrate you more than the enjoyment you get back. For all those reasons, I can't recommend it.

This is the spiritual successor to Castle of the Winds I always wanted. It does so many things and does all of them well. It's entirely up to you whether you want to play it as a traditional roguelike or a roguelite, which is brilliant. Not the most difficult game ever made, which is fine. You want a more dangerous game, eat the gas station egg salad right before they close.

I haven't been hooked by a game like this in a very long time. The combination of roguelike play and deckbuilding strategy is incredibly good.

You can run through it in a little under 4 hours, but it's a great little game and feels like a modern spiritual successor to Uplink, with a little more reality thrown in. Worth the price of admission at $5.

Put several hundred hours in the PS3 predecessor. The gameplay is identical, and I'm very happy about that. They've added league play (which you probably figured out by the name), a new training system and lots of customizable accessories that work similar to Strange items in TF2, tracking this or that stat. And it's very, very pretty. The AI seems to be a bit smarter in some ways and a bit worse in others, I'm seeing more odd hits around the goal that wouldn't happen in SSARPBC. E.g., the AI will occasionally hit it in the wrong direction entirely on offense, and there seem to be a higher number of own goals.

If you're looking to go back to the PS3-style ball cam, it's in options, "Hold Ball Camera" if you don't like the toggle system.