Игрок 3515·Не рекомендует·16 ч в игре

Exapunks proposes a syntactically assembly-like language, whose instructions, however, are commands that manipulate the behavior of robots/viruses. You can use an arbitrary number of robots (although unfortunately most levels can be solved with one, or at most two) and furthermore, each robot is able, through an appropriate command, to create copies of itself that execute the same code. The linguistic paradigm is therefore heavily centered on parallelization and recursion, and this is an extremely fascinating premise. My problem with the game is tied to the fact that most of the levels are gimmicks: in every level a new hardware peripheral, a register, or anyway some specific interaction exclusive to that level is introduced (if you've played SHENZEN I/O I think you understand what I mean; it's very similar and it's the same reason why I dropped that one too), and furthermore, the explanation of said gimmick is missing from the level description, but rather found in the PDFs/external documentation. Therefore, rather than focusing vertically on trying to translate the problem into the game's language, a large part of the resolution lies first in interpreting the prompt (which will be in natural, non-technical language), then going to the documentation to study how the level's gimmick works, and only then comes the part of writing the code, which is generally quite simple. Let me give you an example: a level asks you to dispense all possible money through an ATM. There is a #CASH register that contains an integer (which represents the ATM's total available funds) and a #DISP register (where you have to move numeric values to make the ATM dispense that amount). So I write a program that moves the amount from #CASH to #DISP and it doesn't work; I spend a good thirty minutes trying variations of what I wrote and figuring out where the error is. Then I open the documentation and discover that the maximum transfer limit at a time is $20. So essentially, the level's prompt was asking you to write a loop where you moved $20 at a time into the #DISP register until #CASH was empty. Objectively a very easy level made pointlessly convoluted by an ambiguous prompt and a mechanic that, for some reason, they don't explain to you in the prompt itself. I understand that this serves to make the game more narrative and offer a variety of more specific problems compared to the usual array sorting, prime factorization, etc., but in practical terms, on the programming side, the challenge is truly negligible even after 20 or 30 levels; the possibilities of the language are explored very little, and most of the time you are trying to figure out what the prompt wants rather than trying to solve it. If this doesn't bother you, or you simply appreciated SHENZEN, I think the game still remains extremely valid; unfortunately, that's not the case for me.

Игрок 5338·Рекомендует·48 ч в игре

Every level felt fair except for the second to last one; the rest of the levels felt as though if you thought for long enough you'd always find the solution. Watching your code work for the first time is surprising and rewarding. The programming language is simple enough that you spend all your time focusing on the puzzles and not the language. Having programming experience is not necessary to play this game. This game works very well on linux.

Игрок 4327·Рекомендует·122 ч в игре

There is a lot to like about this game: the story, the art style, the problems being solved, the small extras that provide a break from the main body of the game... Regarding the tasks being solved, the distinct thing in this title, compared to other Zachtronics games, are the network communication and the fact that you program 'agents' and manage their lifecycles. The other distinct thing, if you've played TIS-100 or Shenzhen I/O, is that (for better or worse) this bad boy can take sooo many lines of code! *SLAP* The number of lines is virtually unlimited. If you go over the set threshold for that level, your solution is ineligible for the leaderboard, but if it works, the challenge counts as solved. Out of the things that I found a bit disappointing, the first one I noticed was that quite often, even though each solution is verified against 100 test examples (with different inputs), none of those 100 examples checks for any edge cases, so you go through the effort of producing a complete solution only to get penalized on the leaderboard because you wrote "unnecessary" lines of code that "waste" cycles. For the first part of the game, I'd usually write a solution, see the leaderboard and then create trivialized versions without the "unnecessary" bits, but then I just gave up and went with the flow. I can understand this on the first few levels (it would probably be too harsh to anyone who's new to programming, if such people play this game), but not the whole game had to be like that. Or, the developer could have set 90/100 as 'good enough' and give the player a pass, so that the player could choose if they wanted to bother with special cases or not, or skip them initially and progress through the game and then revisit a challenge once they have more experience. Another thing is that, after a while, solving problems that are algorithmically trivial, and the whole difficulty arises from the fact that the 'agents' you program have one and a half register (there are two, but one is affected by any logical evaluation), gets really old. This especially applies to the bonus campaign, not that much to the main one. Anyway, in summary, a really neat game, slightly soured by the somewhat tedious bonus campaign. BTW, the number of hours next to my name is misleading, it includes hours and hours of the game running and me being away from the keyboard.

Игрок 1537·Рекомендует·3 ч в игре

The goal for each mission is very simple but you have a lot of constraints like buffer size, registers and if you are really down into making decent code, you will spent more time trying to make an efficient code. Really fun game, never thought that I would have fun with low level-ish programming

Игрок 1663·Рекомендует·26 ч в игре

Love this game even though I'm not nearly as good at programming as some of the other folks in the reviews. It just makes you feel like a gritty hacker in a dystopian cyberpunk world. And the soundtrack is great.

Игрок 5425·Рекомендует·24 ч в игре

Un jeu exceptionnel pour les développeurs. Je sais pas si ça peut plaire aux moldus, aka les gens normaux 😂

Игрок 9081·Рекомендует·27 ч в игре

another masterpiece by Zachtronics. If you have some affinity for programming or puzzling, this is a straight recommendation