HackyZack is an okay but not amazing 2D pixel platformer with a fairly simple but kind of interesting twist: rather than the player trying to navigate their way through a level and reach the goal, instead their goal is to jump around and kick a ball around in the air, navigating the ball through the environment to the goal. This gives the game a nice bit of novelty to it, as you are trying to juggle something in the air rather than push through yourself. It is a fresh-feeling mechanic, and it makes the levels feel very different from standard platformer fare.
The levels themselves come in limited variety, but they make fairly effective use of the game’s limited range of mechanics. There are walls you can walljump off of, walls that will block the ball but which the player can fall through, and deadly walls that will kill you, along with all four edges of the screen being killzones. If either you or the ball touch a killzone, you die.
There are a few ball types – a normal ball, a bouncy rubber ball with much greater rebounding, a “time ball” which floats slowly through the air and has much reduced gravity but which can sail a good distance off a kick, a beach ball that is more floaty than the normal ball, a purple UFO-looking ball that is not affected by gravity and will rebound with considerable velocity off of obstacles, and a black ball that controls another ball from a distance, allowing you to kick a ball around through an environment while standing in another area (which is sometimes just a square room, and sometimes is itself a hazardous environment, requiring you to navigate two balls through hazards at once).
There are two kinds of levels as well – goal levels, where the goal is to get the ball to the end goal (and collect a collectable sticker with the ball on the way there, though that is just a completionism bonus) and target levels, where the goal is to destroy a set of targets with the ball in a limited amount of time (though there is ultimately no maximum time limit, these are intended as a speed run challenge, though completing some of them at all is a challenge unto itself). Overall, the game has 110 unique stages, which isn’t too shabby, even if all of them are single-screen challenges. 100%ing the goal levels took a bit under five hours, with the target levels taking another 3-4 hours or so, so the game is not overly long, though given its simplicity, this is definitely for the best.
However, this is a very bare-bones experience. There is little meaningful sense of progression in the game – there are a large number of levels, but only every 10 or so levels do you get any real sense of progress, and even then, while the game adds new mechanics in each set of 10 levels, the levels themselves ultimately feel rather characterless. On the whole, they feel like a very arbitrary set of challenges – which they are. And while this is not awful, it also means that you aren’t really left with much of a feeling of accomplishment, as little meaningful changes and the levels feel very contrived There’s no overarching story or plot or, indeed, any real incentive to beat the game other than “Well, this is a set of challenges to complete”. In fact, I nearly stopped playing altogether about halfway through, and likely would not have completed the game if it didn’t have card drops.
This is why I have a hard time recommending it. If you’ve ever played N++, I had the same issue with that game – the game is just an arbitrary set of challenges, rather than feeling like any sort of cohesive whole. I felt better about HackyZack’s actual gameplay than N++, and the mechanic of keeping the ball in the air is a novel one. But I the end, there’s not much you’re going to get out of this save perhaps a vague sense of accomplishment for overcoming a series of challenges, and that isn’t enough for a lot of people.
Moreover, this game is quite difficult – I beat it, but I suspect it would be pretty frustrating at times to a lot of people, and if you don’t like dying a lot, this is not the game for you.
Ultimately, this is a game only for people who really love hardcore platformers, who don’t need any sort of incentive to play through a bunch of levels that have no meaning but the challenge they represent, who don’t mind a game lacking much character at all, and who like some platforming puzzles. If you don’t have all those those characteristics, this game is likely to either lose your attention or frustrate you.
If you do meet all those criteria, though, and are looking for a different sort of challenge, it might be worth a spin.
2.0