Hackers, The Net, The Matrix; not so very long ago, the world seemed obsessed with the dark underworld of computer crime. Suddenly, the image of the pasty, thin, heavily bespectacled geek on a library computer metamorphosed from “that poor, pathetic man” to “public enemy number one”, almost overnight. The image of the hacker, first popularized by glamorous banditos such as infamous “phone phreak” Captain Crunch, et al skyrocketed into the public imagination. Just think, the power to enter into any system you wish, from anywhere in the world, anonymously. You could learn secrets, add information, and destroy lives: godlike power in an environment free of ethics. Now, finally, without petty inconveniences such as federal police, log tracing, hefty fines, and jail time, Uplink allows you to live the frantic, heady life of a professional electronic espionage and sabotage agent: a Hacker.
Developed by British developer Introversion Software (introversion.co.uk), Uplink casts the player as a hacker in the employ of the Uplink Corporation in the year 2010. Right off the bat, the game does a great job of immersing the player in the situation, rationalizing all the grey areas between reality and the game in a fairly convincing way.
For instance, since players are wilfully committing computer crimes, it naturally follows that sooner or later they're going to run afoul of the law. Players sitting at home playing the game on their PC won't actually get arrested, so how do they reconcile that little gap? It is rationalized that players are linked from their local computer to a Gateway computer located in the Uplink central building. Touches like this really make Uplink an impressive play experience, given its “indie” origins.
Players start out as an unranked rookie, 3000 credits in debt, with a basic computer and very little software. From the Internal Services Machine, players can use their credits to purchase software (such as vital password breakers and Trace trackers to more esoteric items such as a Voice Recorder to bypass voice recognition locks), upgrades to their Gateway (more powerful processors, more memory, and even security, such as motion detectors to tell you when people are near your gateway, and a Gateway Nuke to blow up your computer when the 'Feds start closing in, allowing you to avoid capture), and so forth.
Money is earned by taking missions for various employers. At the very beginning, the missions are very basic - Steal a file, destroy a file, etc. As your experience rating increases, you can take on more and more difficult and complex missions like falsifying academic records or social security documents, all the way to hacking high-security systems in order to steal huge amounts of data, complete destruction of computer systems, ruining lives (i.e. getting people arrested), and catching other hackers.
Gameplay can get very frantic at times as, only a few seconds from capture, you hurriedly hack into a low-security system in order to delete the logs of your call-bouncing, for instance. There is a surprisingly large amount of strategy involved as you rapidly decide which systems to bounce your call through to give you a smaller chance of getting caught (banks and government systems are the hardest to trace back through), or decide how best to carry out each mission.
Recently added was a system for taking on local area networks. These are an outstanding puzzle challenge as you must track your way through a convoluted net of systems and connections, in order to reach the spider, (a target system – usually the master system containing all sorts of nifty stuff) at the centre of this web. Using a whole new set of tools, players must hack a series of systems including phone lines, radio-wave network hubs (each with its own frequency, usually found by hacking yet another system), and locked systems. This must all be accomplished before the systems administrator comes online, boots you out of the network, and systematically traces your path back to your gateway.
There is even a story element, centred around the battle between two rival companies, one of which wants to release the deadly Revelation virus for the purpose of destroying all computers on the earth, the other trying to stop the first with a virus of its own, called Faith. The story is really engrossing, despite the fact that the only real news you get of the conflict comes from the news server, or from the mission briefings.
A word of advice, however: Download the patch immediately, since this is possibly the buggiest game on the market today. The latest patches go a long way to get rid of horrible bugs and fatal errors, ultimately smoothing out your experience.
As far as graphics go, the fare is limited. Everything is laid out much like a typical Windows desktop, with icons and menus representing all your possible actions. Beyond the world map throughout which your digital travel takes place, graphics are limited. The lack of any sort of three-dimensional full-screen anti-aliased graphics, particle-rendered smoke effects or bump mapping fails to make itself felt. This game is a game of clandestine electronic espionage, and the utilitarian, minimalist feel fits the atmosphere perfectly.
The soundtrack of Uplink makes itself known largely in the background. What little music there is resembles very closely that of the movie Hackers – a sort of driving, electronic dance track that, while it doesn’t necessarily add to the experience, it certainly helps to mitigate the eerie tapping of computer keys that invariably accompanies gameplay.
As far as replay value goes, Uplink both is and is not lacking. On the one hand, the free demo version lets you get a little ways into the game, experience the gameplay, but doesn’t pass along really any of the story. The full version of the game definitely keeps you hooked throughout the deliciously convoluted plot, but as far as replay value goes, you’ll probably only be coming back to show your friends, or to mess around with all the systems you can break into (Uplink has a number of “hidden” systems with lots of interesting files to find, and secret missions to perform).
Uplink is a surprisingly good game for an underground piece, with an original concept and clever execution, and is extremely addictive. The demo and ordering information are available on the game's site, http://www.uplink.co.uk.
