Indiescovered: Black Ice

There are a number of great indie games out there that don’t get recognized for the experiences they provide. I am going to try and change that just a bit with a new regular column called Indiescovered. Once a week, I will highlight an indie game that I think has fallen through the cracks or not reached a level of recognition that it deserves. I am starting this column off with a co-operative indie FPS called Black Ice.

Black Ice is a co-operative cyberpunk FPS set in a fairly typical representation of cyberspace that is drenched in neon. The game is touted as Borderlands meets Tron in a procedurally generated virtual cityscape, and I’ve always thought the description was fairly accurate. There’s a shoot-and-loot style of gameplay with light RPG elements in place that is reminiscent of Gearbox’s hit series, along with a number of tongue-in-cheek naming conventions, such as enemies that are named “Popups” or “Aimbots.”

The goal of Black Ice is to hack the servers of dozens of businesses, each of which use randomly generated names, ultimately using the loot and experience earned to take down Finality Incorporated. Each business’ server is represented as a building. To hack it, you have to go up to it, activate your hacking tool, and stay within a circle that appears around the building until the hack’s timer has run out and you have defeated all of the enemies that the building spawns. Once you have completed the hack, the building turns into a wireframe denoting the spot it used to reside in and random loot drops in the center. You do this repeatedly with buildings of increasing difficulties until you are equipped to take on your final challenge. An interesting point to note is that every building in the game can be hacked. Should you be up for the challenge, you can even hack the game’s shop—at the cost of no longer being able to sell unwanted loot. Should you be up for even more of a challenge there’s a world boss that is an actual flying shark.

If you don’t think you can take them alone, you can play co-op either online or over LAN on servers that can hold ten players. Co-op turns an already hectic game into a frenzy, but it can also be exactly what you need at times.

As you progress you will acquire various loot and talent points: shotguns that set enemies on fire, machine guns that freeze, minions that you can spawn, jetpacks, short-range teleports, and more can be acquired as loot. There is no shortage of new items to discover and each one adds interesting new options to the mix.

Each item has various bonuses, ranging from weapon range increases to RAM upgrades. There are even some items that are simply meant take up one hotbar slot in exchange for various bonuses. You can upgrade the same stats by putting your one talent point per level directly into said stat.

Your character progression—including loot and talent points—is persistent, but each session takes place in a completely new, randomly generated world, meaning that sessions are meant to be significantly shorter than other loot-focused games like Borderlands and Diablo. It can still take time, but it is quite gratifying to destroy an entire digital city in a single session.

One of the more interesting features of Black Ice is the use of the same pool of energy for every action that can affect combat—the aforementioned RAM. RAM is a self-replenishing energy source, the replenish rate of which you can upgrade via random stats on gear or talent points. Whether you are shooting, placing mines, sprinting, teleporting, jetpacking, or what have you, you are drawing from that same pool of energy. This creates a level of tactical depth rarely seen in shooters. As you are dodging around, trying to decide what enemies to focus on and what weapons to use on them, you will have to factor in how much RAM you have available and how much each option will take. If you end up hanging around 0% RAM for too long you are almost certainly going to die.

Alternatively, if you think you are going to die you can always run away. Hacking’s requirement of staying within a certain range of the building gives you an easy out. If you simply walk out of the circle and wait a few seconds, the entire hack will reset, despawning all enemies it spawned.

Fortunately, dying isn’t too much of a setback. When you die you respawn at the city’s origin point with slightly fewer credits. If you’re on your own, or everyone hacking a specific building dies simultaneously, you will have to restart your attempt at that building but that is usually only a minor setback.

Gameplay is complemented by a vibrant neon representation of cyberspace. In addition to the brightly-colored city, an assortment of extravagant particle effects light up the screen when battle get intense and things start exploding. A variety of filters, such as CRT mode and a pixelated 1990 mode, are available to alter the visual experience slightly. These can be mixed and matched, altering the way the game looks entirely.

Black Ice is a game that’s great for jumping in and taking down a bunch of baddies while also maintaining a sense of meaningful progression. It’s a game that I can still play after putting a number of hours into it over the course of its development, which is something I can’t say often. It draws you in with the promise of easy hacks and randomly generated loot and then scales the difficulty in a way that is incredibly fair, making the road to taking down Finality Incorporated that much more compelling.

Black Ice is available on Steam for $14.99.