Leak Elite is a strategy game based around hacking computers. You play as your own named hacker, my name was MoonMoon, yes I know that’s a dated meme [Editor’s Note: MoonMoon is timeless. Anyone that says otherwise hates animals.], I love that meme anyways, fuck you. You are part of a small group that calls themselves Leak Elite, and you target places for various reasons. The team reminds me of the real life Anonymous, sometimes they do stuff for the right reasons trying to be good guys, other times they’re trying to fuck people and groups over for the fun of it. Duality of man or whatever.

The story of the game is told through iirc chats between your character and the three or four other members of Leak Elite: Owl, pain, Dantalion, and synapse. You are the master hacker and Dantalion is effectively the leader of the group telling everyone who they’re targeting and assigning targets to people. The focus of the story is for everyone talking about stuff they learned from hacking their targets, you do yours solo, most of the rest are paired up together hitting targets. You have a specific amount of days to get the missions done, or again, game over.

The game has a handful of missions. This doesn’t sound like a lot but in each mission there’s an increasingly large number of hacks you have to do. Every hack, succeed or fail, takes an hour and you have six hours every night to do the hacking. If you fail the same hack two times in a row you get noticed and they start to trace back to you. If you fail the same hack ten times in a row it’s game over, but the likelihood of you failing the exact same hack ten times in a row is fairly low cause there’s a bunch of missions to do and if you don’t get noticed for a full night it goes down some, allowing you to fuck up once before it starts going up again. Every hack has a required method to crash the system which gives you your reward. Sometimes it’s as simple as blocking enemies from loading in, sometimes it’s for making your program unable to be reached, but there are a bunch of other ones some of which got too complicated for my piddly ass to fully understand, even with a fucking walkthrough. A walkthrough will help you figure out the level and what to do on it, but most of the time isn’t going to be an exact answer as there are random movements the game makes.

During the hacks, along with what the game tells you to do, you have eight power every round, whether you use the full eight or not, you only have eight every round to mess with. You use power to: move your pilliar, obtain programs, use programs, and destroy enemy programs. The pillar is simply your piece, it’s just a green set of three blocks one on top of the next, the enemy has red ones of varying heights with different shapes on the blocks to denote what kind of unit it is. Some enemy units don’t move, some move only one space, some teleport around, some move three to five times a turn, some follow you, and some just follow a path; there’s a lot of variation between the enemy’s units and they’re all denoted by their height and the shapes on the pillars.

The game is really fucking hard, and while I fancy myself smart, I’m… eh in the brains department, and I really, really suck at strategy games, they’re like my number one. I’m shit at this type of game, followed by management sims and sports games. I would have liked to see some difficulty options simply so my peabrain could really get into the game, because I liked the mechanics, well at least the ones that I actually fully understood anyways, and the story while not very long, complicated, or personable, was pretty interesting to me. If you like strategy games and don’t mind some minimalistic graphics, this is totally a game for you, otherwise… eh. I did enjoy what I played of the game but I needed a walkthrough to get more than half of what I played and eventually my brain couldn’t handle the game even with a walkthrough so I can’t give it the seal.

Leak Elite was developed by Micatrix.

Point of Sale: itch.io & GameJolt, with a Steam release planned for the future.

$5 all around

A review copy of the game was provided by the dev, Michele Buonanno.

darkmikasonfire does not give Leak Elite the Indie Gamer Team Seal of Approval.