Mainlining
I finished Mainlining yesterday. The game begins with you looking at a pixelated computer screen. So, you're playing on a computer looking at a computer. Computer-ception. You work for the mi7 agency, and I used my own name for the username. Their server was hacked by a hacktivist group called Thorn, and the whole game is about you trying to stop them before they cause any more damage. There's thirteen cases in total, and you're taking these hackers down one-by-one in a cat and mouse game trying to stay ahead of them.
So, the gameplay itself involves hacking. It's pretty simple. You either find a website or ip address from emails, files, the chatroom or various websites. Once you have the ip address, you just type “iphack” in the command prompt to hack into their computers and websites to download their information, bringing you one step closer to taking down the culprits. Can you imagine if it was so easy to hack a computer by just writing “iphack” and then the ip address? Yeah, no lol. Anyway, once you've got the information you now have to look at it carefully because there are three things to do for most of the cases: find the identity of the criminal, determine their location, and link to the evidence of their crime. If done correctly, it's off to jail for the hacker, and it automatically moves on to the next case, but if you make a mistake you can try again. There's no penalty.
It sounds almost repetitive doing the same thing each time, however the story progresses along and mi7 gets deeper and deeper in trying to stop these guys up until one point I actually got accused of murder lol. So, in spite of the repetitive gameplay, the story remained engaging and I enjoyed all the twists and turns. I liked some of the characters too even though you never actually see them on screen, just in the chats, and the tension was still there.
The hacking and getting the information was easy. What was trickier was getting the three details right, so you don't make incorrect accusations. It's not always obvious, and I messed up about every time on one of the details. Usually it was the location for me. However, there were often multiple options because you could accuse different people with different evidence, so it's your choice who you want to put away. There's more than one right answer.
Now a couple critiques. The interface was a little bit clunky. I'd often have multiple windows open and without any copy-paste feature I had to type all those ip addresses by hand, as well as manually typing in the files to download. It's kind of tedious, but since I was having fun with all the hacking and story (I love snooping), I didn't mind too much. Switching between certain apps wasn't very seamless either. Things can start looking really messy on the computer screen. The other issue I had was the autosave. The game only saves after each case, and sometimes it can take a little while to finish a case. Sometimes there's quite a bit of reading involved. So, what I ended up doing was only play one case a day, except for one day I played two because one of them was short, and that's why it ended up taking me longer than I should have needed to to finish this game. I'm not one to play games all day, so I really need manual saves.
The story and the entertaining gameplay more than made up for the clunkier issues, and I quite enjoyed this game. I also liked seeing during the credits what became of each of the characters afterward, and the reveal of the head of Thorn was quite the surprise. Here's a screenshot. This just shows how messy it can get on the computer screen.
Next up, I'm going to play another FMV game called A Trip to Yugoslavia. This one's not by Wales Interactive though, so we'll see how it goes. Got it for about fifty cents from the Steam summer sale, which is sweet.
So, the gameplay itself involves hacking. It's pretty simple. You either find a website or ip address from emails, files, the chatroom or various websites. Once you have the ip address, you just type “iphack” in the command prompt to hack into their computers and websites to download their information, bringing you one step closer to taking down the culprits. Can you imagine if it was so easy to hack a computer by just writing “iphack” and then the ip address? Yeah, no lol. Anyway, once you've got the information you now have to look at it carefully because there are three things to do for most of the cases: find the identity of the criminal, determine their location, and link to the evidence of their crime. If done correctly, it's off to jail for the hacker, and it automatically moves on to the next case, but if you make a mistake you can try again. There's no penalty.
It sounds almost repetitive doing the same thing each time, however the story progresses along and mi7 gets deeper and deeper in trying to stop these guys up until one point I actually got accused of murder lol. So, in spite of the repetitive gameplay, the story remained engaging and I enjoyed all the twists and turns. I liked some of the characters too even though you never actually see them on screen, just in the chats, and the tension was still there.
The hacking and getting the information was easy. What was trickier was getting the three details right, so you don't make incorrect accusations. It's not always obvious, and I messed up about every time on one of the details. Usually it was the location for me. However, there were often multiple options because you could accuse different people with different evidence, so it's your choice who you want to put away. There's more than one right answer.
Now a couple critiques. The interface was a little bit clunky. I'd often have multiple windows open and without any copy-paste feature I had to type all those ip addresses by hand, as well as manually typing in the files to download. It's kind of tedious, but since I was having fun with all the hacking and story (I love snooping), I didn't mind too much. Switching between certain apps wasn't very seamless either. Things can start looking really messy on the computer screen. The other issue I had was the autosave. The game only saves after each case, and sometimes it can take a little while to finish a case. Sometimes there's quite a bit of reading involved. So, what I ended up doing was only play one case a day, except for one day I played two because one of them was short, and that's why it ended up taking me longer than I should have needed to to finish this game. I'm not one to play games all day, so I really need manual saves.
The story and the entertaining gameplay more than made up for the clunkier issues, and I quite enjoyed this game. I also liked seeing during the credits what became of each of the characters afterward, and the reveal of the head of Thorn was quite the surprise. Here's a screenshot. This just shows how messy it can get on the computer screen.
Next up, I'm going to play another FMV game called A Trip to Yugoslavia. This one's not by Wales Interactive though, so we'll see how it goes. Got it for about fifty cents from the Steam summer sale, which is sweet.