It's almost a good game- but has problems that make it bad.

1. Easy. You connect terminals together. Connecting them is easy but setting up routing can be interesting and challenging! The problem? Doing anything slightly advanced isn't needed. The game only requires you to connect them to win- and by connecting them correctly- you could get more money. The problem is that you already have enough money just by doing basic connections. You can win the whole game by using only router and hub.
2. Repetitive. The game is just dig- connect- feel good about it. This would be fine if the destinations had interesting things or challenges. The main destinations (there's about ~5 of them) have interesting things, but they're half baked and not challenging at all. These destinations feel like they got things working, and that was good enough. There is a repeated puzzle place that has unique puzzles- the problem is that they're rarelyyyy an actual puzzle. It's usually just bypass everything and win- or click a couple things til it works.

Otherwise, it's unique and can be interesting. If there's updates that add more challenge to the game I'll play again and revise the review.

Lastly, they should put a limit on how quickly you can click the buttons. You could win the game by just clicking the buttons for money and that shouldn't be the case. Limit it to at least something like 4 clicks a second.

zero tutorials, zero direction on what to do, connection between computers straight up didnt work for me so i couldnt progress. shame bcos its a rly cool concept

Too many unsolvable 'gotchas' where there's no real way of solving the puzzle.

What made me quit was finding out 'hackers' will slow/stop your network; and you must send their packets to a military endpoint. That military endpoint will send "law-enforcement" packets to the hacker and temporarily stop them. This only moves the hacker to another random endpoint. However, law-enforcement packets will be destroyed if they touch a non hacker endpoint. This means you need to set up multiple filters for every endpoint on the network. The resulting packet-loss from collisions slows your network more than the hackers.

If there's a better solution or a mechanic I'm missing, I can't find it on any website/forum.

I really wanted to get into this game. The technical routing and planning is right up my alley, but a lack of guidance and a handful of odd design choices has left me completely befuddled and at a complete dead end just an hour in.

• I get up to the point where I need to link the Mainframes. I tunnel over to the military base and start laying down the network. I see the warning about the spider, so I bring the light with me to the mainframe.
  
• Purge the virus, connect it to the network. But now I can't leave because the spider has spawned in the doorway. It won't move out of the way, and the only way out is to let it kill me.
  
• At this point, a hacker has set themselves up on a terminal right next to one of my main intersections. There's no explanation about how to deal with them, but the death-zone they produce means I have to make a large detour with my network around it.
  
• While trying to stop all the DDOS attacks, all inbound traffic stops. I can't find any rhyme or reason to it. I suspect that the mainframe I had previously connected became infected/had a hacker, as it appears to be sending garbage data. Except I can't get back into the mainframe room as the spider has un-stuck itself, and the light I need to stop it is still back in the mainframe room. So I'm essentially locked out of that room entirely.

Maybe I'll try this again later, but the explanation of how some mechanics works needs some improvement.

just boring.
in my hour of gametime at least half of that time was spent waiting so i could burn the very slow trickle of money you find and earn on digging, running back and forth in caves and tunnels you can't light up, and losing money on repeated waypoint signals.

it probably gets better later on when you unlock more advanced parts and mechanics, but that's going to take me such a long time of dull waiting and aimless digging to get there.
i just don't have the patience for that when the games introduction is mostly waiting for money, using all of that money to dig closer to another endpoint, then waiting for more money to either dig closer or buy the equipment.

I wanted to like it but at present I cannot recommend it. I really like the atmosphere, graphics and the gameplay loop idea, but it feels like an early alpha version of a good game.

My biggest gripe is with the monster encounters which are just really annoying. It's possible to turn them off but that does not work either, since you'll still hear the suspense music and see the visual fear effect but the monsters just stand there. It feels like playing in debug mode, breaking the immersion completely. Then there are the DDOS attacks which are also annoying and boring to handle. I also felt that the game does not communicate enough what I should be doing. And then there were minor turn offs here and there like grammatical errors in texts and some graphical issues etc.

I dont' know... I really really liked the first hour or two of playing, so I hope they'll continue developing it as there's a lot of potential. But for me it's just not there yet.

As much as I like this game (I REALLY like it) It bothers me that as a robot, i'm yanked out of my suspending disbelief with politcs. Instead of something tongue-in-cheek about pronouns, master/slave or 1/0 something to do with I don't know, actual IT, he/him she/her. Quite putting politics in games.

Interesting to do the most basic level of networking, but the game purposefully limits/does not include many network basics even from decades ago. Connecting wires is a pure hellscape and you can't change ports so the hubs are just impossible to do.

Games incredibly tedious, needs more technical options. Call it easy mode or something but right now I could be having more fun with Packettracer

I'm a Network/Sysadmin.
Yes, while this might give the impression how networks work on the bottom, this doesn't come close. Beeing a natural logical thinking person I tried designing something that will make my life easier routing packets. But given the games tools, you are impossible to do that unless you tunnel out a huge area and spend hours building your "routing center".

The problem all lies with the design of the so called "hubs" with 3 possible directions. No, they don't work like network hubs. A signal on port 0 will be sent to port 1. If it bounces back from Port 1 it will be sent on port 2.

The next component you unlock is a filter. "Neat I can narrowly filter my packets now!". No. You can only set one octet of the IP-Address in the decimal system. In example "*.*.1.*".

Having "hubs" with only 3 ports also makes packets returning to another subnet nigh impossible.

makes me use too much brain :(