Hypercube: Source review

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Hypercube: Source, much like the movie it is based on, takes an amazing idea and somehow makes it very, very hard to swallow.

Curse you, laser trap!

Can deathtraps be fun? Is there a certain appeal to being lost in an endless maze of identical corridors, left only to rely on your increasingly psychotic friends? Have you ever had to "boot" a room before?

These are the questions Hypercube: Source should ideally be asking. In a truly perfect world, this would be a mod about working together, desperately trying to survive the deathtraps, with only a single life to a round and an almost limitless expanse of places to die in. Much like The Hidden: Source, players would be forced to ban together, make split second decisions, and watch as their comrades are torn apart before them.

Instead, Hypercube: Source is buggy, difficult, and not very fun to play in its current state.

And it is so disappointing, because there is such potential for this mod to be good. With a little revision and polish, this could be a great mold breaking multiplayer romp. Based on the inferior sequel to a fantastic sci-fi horror film, Hypercube: Source is a story about the futility of society, of boundless human stupidity, and the limits people are willing to go for survival. It is a story of seemingly innocent people locked within an endless maze of deathtraps, forced to find their way out while coping with the horrifying realization that while big brother may or may not be watching them, he certainly doesn't care what happens.

I guess "down" is out of the question.

The mod, however, forgoes the social criticism for the visceral thrill of trying to escape a mathematical net filled with very wrong turns. For those of you who aren't very familiar with the concept, a tesseract hypercube is a geometric entity that exists in four dimensions, rather than our normal three. It endlessly loops in on itself like a net, making way for billions of rooms to exist simultaneously with one another. Not only this, but there is always the risk of heading right into the same room you've been in before, just in another time, or even bumping into yourself. While this might evoke feelings of Prey, Hypercube: Source ignores the possibilities of the concept and instead uses it as a means of restricting your movement.

A hypercube may have billions of rooms, but Hypercube: Source only has a handful which endlessly connect back to themselves, preventing you from making any real headway in a given direction. Not only this, but the rooms have a nasty habit of switching on you as you head through a doorway. See that perfectly clean, harmless looking room on the other side of a door? Well, as you wander in, the game will often hiccup and deposit you right into a room full of bodies that you definitely wouldn't have entered had you seen it normally a minute before.

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Boot!

But this can be overlooked. It's just another way the hypercube tries to kill you, right? It's just the risk you take by wandering around through a maze of death. Fine. I can accept that. What I can't accept, though, is how freaking hard it is to get into these rooms to begin with. See, the hypercube has doorways in the middle of all four walls, on the ceiling, and on the floor. These doorways are "accessible" via ladders that are built into the wall, allowing you several exits from your current location. The problem is, the ladders barely work. Never mind that characters have no climbing animation, in the initial release of the mod, the ladders were so buggy that most people couldn't even exit from the room they spawned in!

Now moving between rooms is possible, but it requires a fancy jumping trick that the developer feels is enough of a fix to warrant ignoring the problem. When the entire cornerstone of your game play is moving between rooms, making it possible to do so with a minimum of difficulty should be rather high on the priorities list, I think.

But, if you can manage getting up the ladders, you can also manage "booting" a room. In a nod to the movie, the only item you can carry around through the cube is your own boots, which you can throw into a room to see if it is trapped or not. Unlike the movie, these boots are made from plastic explosives and detonate after being thrown. Rather than implementing the boot as a non-destructible physics object, we instead get to toss around remodeled grenades, which makes reusing them rather hard. Thankfully, boots spawn randomly throughout the hypercube, meaning you won?t be totally lost when you've tossed your given two.

When aerobics go bad.

Whether or not the boots truly help you get through the traps, though, is a different matter. While most of them work without a hitch, several of the traps are not implemented very well and can even crash the game at times. First we have the spike trap, where spikes materialize a few inches away from the walls they should be coming out of. Then there is the wire mesh, which looks like a grating texture taken out of the first Half-Life and loves to screw up the game when you enter the room from the wrong side. Or what about the explosion trap, which somehow manages to make the already present in game lag even worse?

There are supposed to be a lot more traps, but I couldn't find half of them in all the time I spent playing this, online and by myself. The best looking trap, however, has to be the electrical laser net, which gives you the illusion you might be able to survive before blasting you into the next world. This is also the only trap that seems to have actually come out of the movie Hypercube, whereas all of the others were lifted from the original film.

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Glad I wasn't wearing that shoe when it went off...

It was a nice touch to see the Cube musical theme present at times, although, again, it seems lifted from the original film and not the actual movie on which the mod is based. Graphically, Hypercube: Source is a fine balance between really great looking set pieces and lackluster everything else. The hypercube itself looks fantastic, identical to the movie in every way, even in how the doors open. Yet the traps themselves, with one exception, look badly modeled and are definitely in need of refinement. All of the character models are stripped right out of Half-Life 2, yet many of the animations seem to be missing. And on that note, why don't they just use the normal citizen models, which look close enough to the prison-style uniforms the people in the cube were forced to wear?

In all honesty, I have a hard time recommending this mod to anyone except hardcore fans of the movies. I've always wanted to see a Cube mod come out, allowing me to brave the cold inhumanity that is the cube and see if the outside world is truly a place I can escape to, but this one just doesn't work the way it should. While there is nothing wrong with this as a multiplayer endeavor per say, it bares mentioning that you'd have to find a dedicated group of people to play the game straight and work together to win, which is very hard to come by in online gaming. With a little more work, cleaning up the bugs and streamlining the play, this could truly be a game to play. But as it stands, the only way I was going to escape the hypercube was to quit.

(+) Great concept.
(+) Environment looks just like the movie.

(-) Buggy, lags, and loaded with glitches that need ironing out.
(-) Boots explode after a single use.
(-) Not much longevity if you aren't a fan of the movies.