Black Ice

jUST PERFECT.

I'm a GenX gamer who grew up as a huge fan of Tron, played the TTRPG Shadowrun, and loved the first two Borderlands games, so when I stumbled across this game a few years ago and saw the tagline "Think Borderlands meets Tron" in the description, I was instantly intrigued.

Essentially, this is a looter shooter FPS that does all its storytelling through a series of emails (so, text only!) that you receive asking you to hack various servers located around the map, each represented by a structure that in total make up the geography of the landscape. Every time you hack a server, it spawns a bunch of enemies (intrusion countermeasures, aka ICE) of its color that you have to defeat while staying within a certain radius of the server. You can hack multiple servers at once as long as they're located near one another, and this can be a helpful strategy if they're different colors (representing different industries) as they will fight each other as well as you during the hack.

Like any looter shooter, there are TONS of different weapon types to find with lots of modifiers, bonuses, and specials to combo together. One of the special things about Black Ice, however, is the way it allows you to completely customize your "deck" (aka hotbar). You have a certain amount of RAM which determines the number of programs (weapons and other utilities) you can have loaded at any given time on your deck, and you can bind those to not only the 1-6 keys and your right mouse button but also your shift and space buttons (!), meaning you can rebind your jump and sprint to be something completely different or find upgrade utilities for them as well. Wild stuff, and you can make really strange builds as a result.

The trailer makes the game look incredibly chaotic and visually noisy, and there are definitely moments when things get hairy, but because combats usually only happen when you trigger a hack (unless you're in obviously dangerous areas), most of the time the game keeps a relatively calm pace until you're ready for the action to get crazy. The most frustrated you're likely to get while playing is when you fall from a very high place and have to spend a long time figuring out how to get back to where you were. Even dying isn't particularly punishing in Black Ice: you lose a chunk of money (which is plentiful enough), and you respawn back near your base. No big shakes, aside from the time you'll spend running.

Oh, and did I mention the game supports multiplayer up to TEN PLAYERS? It's my dream to have a server full of hackers jumping and grappling all over the place hacking ICE like it's going out of style, but for now I can only speak to playing with 2 or 3 people, and it's a lot of fun playing in a small squad like that. It's relatively easy to create specialized builds, so if you had a regular group, you could definitely have a squad built to work together spec'd out in interesting ways in this game.

The game has bugs, but they are minor and forgivable for a two-person dev team. As of the time of writing, map markers sometimes do not clear from hacked servers after they've been cleared, and sometimes enemies and minions will path very strangely or get stuck entirely and have to despawn, or you'll have to cancel a hack entirely and start over which can be annoying. The devs are extremely responsive to feedback and are active on their Discord, however, and have said they will address the map marker issue above in a future update.

Speaking of the devs: this game is obviously a labor of love that has been over a decade in the making, and it shows in the worldbuilding and in the tiny details you'll come across in the game as you play. The storytelling in the emails is good, but the stuff you find organically throughout the environment is really what pulls it all together into a cohesive experience, and they're still expanding and building this world. That's part of why I'm so forgiving of what minor bugs there are, because this is an beautiful, dystopic, evolving world that I want to be a part of, and I think you should too.

Borderlands x Tron + content updates for 11 years = good game.

very cool game

If the game looks like something you would enjoy, it is definitely something you would enjoy.

Not only do you get to make your own build, but explore a handcrafted world that has been actively developed for over a decade. There is a lot to explore at the pace of your choosing. The developers are open to feedback and look forward to improving their game.

Looking forward to the time i will sink into this

It's been around a long while and it's come a long way. The core of the game was pretty good to begin with -- super basic start arenas, shoot critters, get loot, but they've also done a lot over the years to give the game some geography and verticality, which massively improves the experience. The Kinetic Temple is open now with one of the best 'monologues' I've gotten to experience, and it's very colorful. You may sometimes need to restart a few times to get the loot you want. And don't expect to be able to ADS (there *is* a specific item type for a "zoom" effect, though).

Honestly, it's well worth it, and coop seemed to work really well when I tried it too.

You wouldn't hack a healthcare company who denied your neighbor's sick 5-year old daughter because the cost of treatment + interest exceeds her projected lifetime earning potential.

...would you?

I love this game. I found this game many years ago when the developer was at a video game conference showing off the game and I fell in love with it. I've played it for about 20 plus hours. Some of them on my friend's account and the 14 here. I haven't played in a long time but I am a part of the discord group and I get all the updates and I love that the developer is constantly creating new content for the game after all these years. I know when I played a few years back the UI wasn't amazing but it was fine. I'll have to start playing again see if that's changed or not. If you like shooter games with an RPG aspect try this out. I love the visuals. It's definitely a fun game! There is a demo you can try and if you like it get the main game. The community in the discord is also pretty nice.

Pretty dang fun

Black Ice, this is a game inspired by Looter Shooters, primarily lookin at Borderlands for this reference as its the closest feeling game, even the Steam page references it as inspiration! Loot is fun to earn, can be hard to replace and is overall very addicting to grind for if you get into the meat of the game. One issue we have when it comes to Borderlands is the endgame, you just grind BiS till you can fight a boss to get more BiS, in Black Ice however, once you beat the game you unlock New Game+, and ontop of that you can even make alternate characters for new builds.

One thing I really wish we got, is class mods. Having things to buff weapons types you don't feel are super good, we have Long Range damage, but no Close Range damage, along with this I love how much gear we can equip but it doesnt feel like enough. I'd love a class mod slot that provides us one more bonus, but atp its just bloat on the balance.

I love this game more than some of the Borderlands games, and I can't wait to see future updates.

genuinely one of my top 5 indie games
devs are nice and are an active part of community
music is some of my favorite ever

for a game i first got so long ago, it's become incredibly fun as i play it more. everything feels like the stylised hacker craziness of 90s movies and i love it.

this is probably the game thats been sitting in my wishlist for the longest (roughly 2016) and ive always postponed buying it, always with the excuse that i already had other games to play. 8 years later and i notice its 10 year anniversary is today, so happy bday black ice!

good game and the only reason i know about this is because of my dad but the gameplay loop gets boring after a while

This game is great, an excellent cyber looter shooter/horde shooter hybrid with lots of character.

THE BUGS ARE BACK!

In all seriousness though, it's been updated constantly through years, passionately. I highly recommend this quality game, it's just super fun.