Review: Hull Rupture
Protect your spaceship from the aliens.
THE GAME
Hull Rupture is a roguelike tower defense and base/resource management game developed by Konfa Games and published by tinyBuild. Earth has ended, and your ship is one of humanity's last hopes, with the Despot in control. Now, your goal is to keep your ship moving and prevent the aliens from destroying you. Manage resources, build more modules for your ship, explore the galaxy, and battle using towers and defenders against waves of enemies who will try everything to end your journey.
MY IMPRESSIONS
The Despot series gets another game. Hull Rupture, following the series' tradition, completely changes the gameplay style of its predecessors. Now, we have a tower defense roguelike with base and resource management. And if that seems like a lot for just one game, it's because it is. Initially, when playing for the first time, don't worry if you get lost. The game is in Brazilian Portuguese, which makes it much easier to understand everything presented in the tutorial and descriptions. Although the tutorial is well explained, it leaves a lot for the player to learn on their own, and that's good in a way; the problem is that some of these things should be in the basic tutorial explanations. Some might say that this is holding the player's hand too much, but if you intend to keep the player engaged and interested, it's important not to frustrate them. Your ship is divided into modules of different sizes. In them, you can build rooms that will help you on your journey, generating energy, creating humans, and producing resources, for example. This part is essential for resource management, which is based on exchanging one resource for another. You can use humans to generate energy, but you can also sacrifice them for fuel, just as you can exchange energy for other resources and those same resources for energy or another resource. It's a great resource juggling act, where you manage what you need at any given moment, whether it's to build other modules and rooms or to position defense towers. You can always buy more space for your ship, but the shape and composition of rooms will always be random. The tower defense part is much simpler: you build the towers in predefined locations and can reposition them whenever you want. This is the basis of what the player must do throughout the game.
Your ship can't fly aimlessly, so you select your destination on a galactic map, where there may be events, shops, or items. Remember that your ship needs to keep moving, and fuel will dictate that. We still have the speed factor, which depends on the ship's weight, making your journeys faster or slower depending on the weight. From time to time, waves of enemies will attack your ship with the goal of destroying the Despot, and if this happens, your game ends and you must start all over again. If you defeat the wave of enemies, a shop opens where you can spend your credits on passive abilities, installable modules, or packages with three random rooms and/or towers. The further you go in the enemy waves, the harder they become, so your ship upgrades must be constant. However, your biggest enemy is randomness. Since everything is based on RNG (Random Number Generator), some games may start doomed to failure if you don't receive crucial modules or rooms for a good game. There's something about the game's balancing that isn't quite as good as it should be, because even though it's a game based on randomness, it seems like there's a sure formula for success that's always the same, and for me, that kind of kills the idea of a roguelike game. You'll almost always be unlocking new things for your next playthroughs by completing certain requirements. You can also unlock new ships, which have different module configurations. There are also game modes different from the basic ones, as well as higher difficulties, for those players who really need a greater challenge. The art continues in the style of its predecessors, with fluid and funny animations, very characteristic of the series. Hull Rupture is, without a doubt, a game that demands a lot of trial and error, which may frustrate some, but may be the fuel for challenges that others seek.
ACHIEVEMENTS
Hull Rupture's achievements are very varied. For each game mode, for example, you'll have several variations, such as reaching a numerical resource objective in a single match, winning with a specific ship, winning without your ship reaching a certain speed limit, surviving a certain number of enemy waves, and, of course, simply winning that mode. In general, you might get some of these achievements without even knowing they existed, because since it's a roguelike and you'll naturally play many matches, you might end up fulfilling the requirements for some achievements at some point. Some others are very specific and will require the player to plan ahead to complete them, as these may ask for something too specific. Finally, we have the achievements related to the player's defeats, which I would normally criticize as rewarding bad play or losing, but in the case of Hull Rupture, losing is just a cycle of the game, since it's a roguelike and you won't always win anyway. In short, achieving 100% completion in Hull Rupture will require some effort from players due to the game's inherent randomness, which may not be helpful for players aiming for a very specific goal.
CONCLUSION
I really enjoy the Konfa Games series. Currently, I have four of them, including Hull Rupture. Of the four, I was genuinely entertained by half. Hull Rupture wasn't one of them. For me, the problem here is the excessive number of elements. Combining roguelike, tower defense, and resource and base management in this format didn't work for me. When I saw it was a tower defense game, I was really excited because I like the genre, but unfortunately, this part of the game is the most basic and uninteresting. Hull Rupture consists of juggling resources while hoping the RNG gives you something decent so your match doesn't end prematurely. I can see where the developers were going with it, and it's interesting, but the RNG makes it confusing and often frustrating.
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