Your protagonist has been recently dismissed by Radiometrix Corporation, and a neighbour he's known for a long time suddenly asks him to pay for her daughter's treatment costs. His only ability to earn now is through his hacking skills, which he begins putting to good use. Of course, nothing is ever that simple, and soon, hints of larger conspiracy emerge. However, the game's Story to Gameplay Ratio leans very heavily on the latter, and there's even a developed multiplayer mode.
See Uplink, Hacknet and Quadrilateral Cowboy for more realistic portrayals of hacking in video games.
Tropes present in this game:
- Advancing Boss of Doom: The shark ship if you get too close to the tower.
- Airborne Mook: A few, such as the medusa-like "Aimbots". Many of them can also be summoned to your side through specific items.
- Animal Mecha: The basic digital defenders are small spider bots called Cyberwet Crawlers, medusa-like Aimbots, slightly stronger scorpion bots named Scorporations, and larger, indeterminate crawlers called Ghosts in the Shellfish.
- Boom, Headshot!: The player can score headshots, and there are perks associated with them as well. For instance, Braincase will heal the player a little every time they shoot something in the head.
- Bottomless Magazines: Downplayed and justified. Because you are in cyberspace, there's obviously no physical ammo to worry about. However, shooting weapons or deploying abilities like summonable companions draws on your RAM, and it's possible to overtax it and be unable to do anything for a while. However, it regenerates very quickly, and so is essentially equivalent to an "overheat" mechanic in some games.
- Continuing is Painful: If you get ICED, the tower that killed you only gets harder.
- Critical Hit: These can be randomly scored by your weapons, and you can invest level-up points into improving this chance.
- Cyberspace: Naturally, the Supermesh is this. Hacking servers is as easy as physically navigating to the "buildings" that represent them, and security systems manifest in the form of bats and spiders.
- Deflector Shields: Escalation update added Barriers to the game, which function in this manner.
- Double Jump: Present, since you are in cyberspace and normal gravity doesn't apply.
- Enemy Civil War:
- Escalation update added the ability for corporate servers to perform Hostile Takeovers on each other, with the winner growing much stronger in process. Of course, you can just try to hack them both while they are weakened by their in-fighting.
- One incentive to hacking multiple servers is that their ICE will fight each other as much as they'll fight you.
- Healthcare Motivation: Your character starts hacking corporations because their neighbour, Monica Guiterrez had her daughter diagnosed with MRSN, an illness whose treatment costs so much it exceeds her "lifetime earning potential" in the eyes of the MegaCorp owning all the area's clinics, and so your hacking is the only way you can help pay for it.
- Hollywood Hacking: The Game. You won't ever see a line of code; just turn on an icebreaker and shoot all the defensive programs it chases out of the server, drawn as a simple geometric shape styled in Tron Lines. Moreover, the servers are clusters standing right next to each other in cyberspace, so your character can literally walk a couple of steps from one to another, and hack several at the same time.
- Homing Projectile: The Seeker projectile type functions in this manner. Aimhax perk makes all the weapons home in on the target.
- Ironic Name: WeCare is a medical MegaCorp that won't bother offering any treatment to people if they estimate their "lifetime earning potential" is less than the costs.
- MegaCorp: Plenty of these are named in the backstory. Medical corporation WeCare is particularly horrifying due to its entirely calculating approach to the manners of life and death, and how inescapable it is: Monica Guiterrez, who asks your help to pay for her daughter's treatment, mentions that all the clinics in a 100 km area are owned by them alone.
- Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: Your little fight against a crushing corporate system - hacking to enable automated services to save a little girl's life - reveals that there is some kind of massive outbreak that the Megacorps are trying to cover up, and the conspiracy goes all the way to the beginning of the 'net.
- Pinball Projectile: The Drunken Master perk makes all of your projectiles ricochet.
- Powers as Programs: Every single ability, ranging from a shotgun to the actual ability to jump, takes up space in your "Deck", and is equippable, buyable, and sellable. Justified, of course, as you're in Cyberspace. At its most literal is the "Executables" item class, which are literally various spells in the form of equippable programs.
- RPG Elements: You level up as you defeat enemies, and can invest points in order to improve health, weapon damage, critical hit chance, hack speed, RAM, and Loot find chance.
- Shout-Out: The title itself is one to William Gibson Neuromancer, where ICE stood for Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, and Black ICE was the dreaded top-of-the-line variety that outright killed any failed hackers.
- One of the slightly stronger early enemies is called Ghost in the Shellfish.
- Summon Magic: "Minion" items let you easily call and recall some of the various enemies to fight for you with a push of a button.
- Punny Name: Many of the enemies are given wordplay names related to various computer terminology, including but not limited to the Webcrawlers, the Scorporation, and the E-Snail.
- Take Cover!: Downplayed; the game is too fast-paced and old-school for anyone to crouch behind corners, but the updates have eventually taught the melee bots not to unnecessarily expose themselves to your shots, while the ranged ones will climb on top of servers to get better firing angles.
- Tron Lines: The entire cyberspace is drawn in this manner, with the "ground" consisting of a grid, while every object and bot has a black body with a neon-colored outline.
- We Will Spend Credits in the Future: The game's currency is called "BitCreds", although it still uses the dollar sign.
- What the Hell, Hero?: If you choose to participate in the questline where you help the rival companies prank each other, Anima gives you a "Really??". If you continue the questline, they express that they thought you believed in something, but now they aren't so sure.
