A great step for Actalogic
HYPERNOVA: Escape from Hadea joins the exclusive club of games available on Steam that use capital letters in their title, along with such a prestigious company as METAL GEAR: RISING, METAL GEAR RISING: GROUND ZEROES and, of course, PL
AYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS. Before talking about the new title of Actalogic, responsible for the development and publication of it, we must talk about the past of these developers. Actalogic is born from two tributaries: The explosive succ
ess of Goat Simulator with respect to its budget and the barrage of new games that appeared on Steam when Valve stopped monitoring Steam Greenlight.
Goat Simulator went out there in April 2014 and represented a considerable change in the indie video game industry. The team of CoffeStain Studios had been working in Sanctum for a few years, curiously another combination of the tower defense
genre, in this case with a cooperative shooting game. After launching the world its sequel, they decided to make one of those now ubiquitous game jams in which, over the course of a few days, everyone tries to create their own videogame or concept of it. The idea
is to enhance the creativity of the participants by putting constraints on their creative capacity, clear limits that force them to find new ways of doing things. In this case the creativity, taken to its purest extreme, led to a goat.
The idea that was gradually gaining the attention of the studio was simply making a game with a goat as the protagonist. As users flooded the virtual mailboxes of the study they decided to assign a team to the project. And so, after only a few months, Goat Simulator saw the light. The limited budget of the title and its spectacular success with almost one million unit
s sold in mere months advocated a wave of “simulators” on Steam. And that, coupled with the fact that Valve was leaving more and more games
created with minimal effort, led to an explosion of the genre. Simulators of the most disparate things began to appear on Steam, allowing players to reach their most intimate desires to be sand, water or grass. Yes, Grass Simulator is something that exists on Steam. You can buy a pack of four for your friends for fifteen euros.
One of the developers who took advantage of this new genre of extremely mediocre simulators was Actalogic. Your previous hits have juicy titles like Airport Simulator, Agrar Simulator, Woodcutter Simulator and let’s not forget RECYCLE
: Garbage Truck Simulator. The criticism of users on Steam is not good or pleasant and honestly the games seem not to have taken t
oo much effort or affection in their development. But Actalogic is changing. His latest games already presented a change in the way of thinking, with better interfaces, premises and some effort put into their
mechanics and the playable experience. Games like INDUSTRY MANAGER (to Actalogic it costs to him not to use capital letters in the titles)
already presented / displayed a certain promise, but with HYPERNOVA the developer can be considered finally legitimate.
So let’s talk about the game that concerns us. HYPERNOVA is an interesting combination of real-time strategy with tower defense, which is the popular mobile genre in which we must defend something based on placing strengths on predefined paths. That
is where HYPERNOVA breaks the molds, ending with the predefined paths to let you place the structures at your pleasure at any point on the
map. Unfortunately, he makes several mistakes along the way that prevent this being the first excellent Actalogic title. For now.
Innovative premise, decent execution
The initial premise of HYPERNOVA is extremely attractive. Unfortunately, my first impressions of the title were not good. First, he decided to assign the worst graphic quality available to my computer, nothing that could not be fixed with a look at the optio
ns menu (which is quite complete). What is more irritating and difficult to avoid is the introductory tutorial and video. The game, which is not available in our language, has a single voice actor with a number of insignificant lines. The narrator of the
game is an alien with a forced accent of African speaking English. We do not exaggerate when we say that it is one of the worst interpretations that have been seen in a video game. Fortunately, once the game starts you can reduce its volume to zero and stop being a problem.
Once this first impression is over, you find a game that is clearly done with love and that is very pleasant. HYPERNOV
A works for user purposes like a traditional real-time strategy game, with the only exception that instead of units that we can control we create static turrets whose shots are guided only by their slightly deficient artificial intelligence
. Those who have always wanted a strategy game in which you only build buildings will feel at home in HYPERNOVA. The first phases of the game are a placid process of creating structures, placing them and waiting for the next technology to be developed in order to create new types of structures.
