Hacking for Hermann

[b]7/10[/b] Program your drones to hack into servers and find out what happened with your brother. [b]What is it:[/b] A mixture of programming, RPG, and rogue, an interesting combination that somehow works. The story: In the near-ish future, your brother suddenly disappears, and your only hunch points you to his work as an engineer for a research company developing something secret. Good thing you're an expert hacker, so you deploy your drones to hack into servers and find out what really happened. The gameplay: You get up to 3 drones that you can program using simple instructions like pick a target, move closer to it, attack it. Each server is presented as a tree of nodes, containing either enemy drones which you must defeat in order to get access to the next nodes up the tree, useful resources like upgraded drones, new instructions, or CPU, battery and weapon expansions, or emails that help you uncover the story. You can see exactly what drones you're facing, including their programming, so you can customize your drones for each battle. In the battle, each drone takes a turn and runs its program, until all the enemy drones are either destroyed or out of battery. Every time yo…

Hacking for Hermann is a simple playground to ♥♥♥♥ around in but that doesn't make it any less fun. The story part is a bit of a mystery read as you're hacking into company files to understand what became of your brother. The other part is the loop of gathering executables and utilizing them better and better. You can literally watch yourself ♥♥♥♥ up and understand exactly how and why each time so you can regroup and rearrange your strategy better until you find THE THING and never have to improve again. I love projectiles. :3 Anyway, it's not mechanically deep so if you want something to really sit in a figure out, nope! But if you want a time killer rooted in minimalist design and fanfare, ding, ding, ding!

Really nice game that is much deeper than it looks. Very satisfying RPG element where you up your stats by gathering better components. Good strategy and balancing which makes you thing a bit and plan your attack. The start is a bit daunting, but you soon get into the swing of it. Active solo developer, happy to continue working on the game.

A very strategic game set in a virtual world. You're tasked with finding your missing brother. The goal is to hack servers for information. Assemble and program AI's to break through the firewalls and security. Read emails and unlock encrypted files. When you finish the campaign, there are four generated challenges to keep you busy. If you're interested, check out the demo on the store page.

As of October 2025 -- game is playable (with a caveat). Writing this as a counter to the review from 2024 claiming the game was not playable. Caveat: the first time I launched the campaign, it glitched and put me in an unwinnable position (a barrier between me and the enemy, with no ranged weapons or ability to lower the barrier). I had to back out of the campaign and start a new one, which then worked fine. It's worth giving a shot if you enjoy this type of visual programming game.

Unplayable. Couldn't even make it through the tutorial. The clincher was when the tutorial said "your AI should definitely be able to make it through the first firewall, it's just there to illustrate..." Many tries exhaustively exploring every possible way; never did make it through the first firewall. I decided to skip the tutorial and try the game itself and the same happened again. Unplayable game: avoid!