The early days of Android games were fun. No pay to win mechanics, no endless grinding, no wait X hours before you can play again. It was a simpler time, meaning that more developers were doing unique work to get noticed.

At this time Joaquim Vergès who was currently riding off the success of his Twitter client Falcon along with Fabien Devos decided to do something different. They decided to make a puzzle game for coders. The premise was simple, get an output for a given input by writing the code for it. That game’s name is Hacked and is the subject of today’s review.

Graphics & Sound:

The graphics are something straight out of the Matrix and other hacker movies. It has green borders with text being in white and darker colours. The different text colours represent the different types of code. A quick example of this:

Variables are blue
Conditions are red
Functions are purple
Constants and operators are white

The colour usage makes telling the different elements a part a piece of cake.

There is no sound.

Gameplay:

Before everyone runs away thinking this is a game purely for coders let me say this: It is not extremely difficult to get into since the game walks you through nearly everything. The first puzzle is just basic addition and it grows steadily. You do need to understand some core concepts like the 0 position is the first in a set and an “=” sign gives the value on the right to the variable on the left but that’s about it. For everything else you get a brief explanation before first use.

As mentioned before, the objective is to get a result for a given input. Unlike a lot of puzzle games Hacked doesn’t give you only one way to solve the problem. You can write the code anyway you like but the faster you complete the puzzle the better your score so your logical reasoning is key. It seems that the game actually checks the code for output as you can enter any variable and see what output it gives you for the associated input. You don’t actually write the code but use predefined buttons to type out the code, this means that you can type “var a” with one tap or the complete frame of an “If” condition with a tap.

At time of writing, the Hacked site is down making it impossible to look at the online documentation and tutorials. Thankfully there are guides and resources on reddit but that means a Google search for something that should be offered in game. A word to developers: Pack whatever you can into the game itself, don’t keep it on an external site unless the app and site will definitely die together.

There is also a freeform mode where you build your own app or game inside Hacked. Before the site died you could also get creations from other users. This game could have been a great code teacher, even taking on Scratch and Code.org from our recent stuff to do post.

Conclusion:

The missing market, documentation, tutorials and needing a sign in to Twitter for cloud saving makes me not want to recommend Hacked but at the same time I noticed I didn’t watch 5 episodes of M*A*S*H because I was trying to solve puzzles.

Being a great time waster with fun puzzles that can be solved your way along with the really low price of free I can recommend Hacked just for the puzzles alone.