First of all, good job, that was an interesting expansion. I always enjoyed the counter-hack gameplay in Hacknet and you used this as your main gimmick in this expansion, so you already have some sympathy points with me.

I really liked how you tried to integrate procedural news and thread generation along with the game. Made you feel like you had some impact with what you were doing. Many times in Hacknet I felt like I'm just there and I'm being "reacted on" and not "reacted with". That changed with the Labyrinth expansion and the addition of the IRC chat. I see many people try to make other hackers feel at home and I always appreciate the thought.

The premise is an interesting one, putting off hackers against each other to test their might, sounds like a bloody good gladitorial fight. All about fast typing, knowing your tool timings and preparing for those proxies and firewalls.

Players who defeated me messed with my files, made some .exe duds and forced me to restore my x-server. Awesome, I love the terminal mode and how blind you are if you don't know what you are doing.

And god, this CTF game is a brilliant innovation, though I wouldn't call it CTF, rather a paper chase or scavenger hunt, because I felt like I'm less "capturing" and rather "following breadcrumbs".

Unfortunately, this is also where my praise ends, because I felt like it was nothing more either. I felt that only the last mission tried to go out of their way to establish the "normal" Hacknet vibe and it was an obvious branching path aswell.

The announcer in the first three solo fights was obnoxious for me, to say the least. He interrupted my console commands, he interrupted my firewall analyze pass, making it even harder in the end. I know, if you'd have another console exclusive for his commentary, you'd probably done it, but in the end, I didn't even listen to him anymore because during this time pressuring typefest I mostly focused on what I was typing and how well I was doing. I get the idea, it is appreciated, but ultimately forgettable to me.

In addition, I get to recruit my own team, but in the end, they don't help me out at all? Well, what was it for then? The ReadMe stated that teammates would help me out with mails and threads but none of that happened. I received no mails during the CTF and the thread server was deleted from my list. Felt like an idea that got scrapped in the end, really disappointing.

As well as you did with the procedural thread and news generation, it just stopped midway and it felt really awkward, like people suddenly didn't want to talk about me, the CTF or Hacker Wars anymore. You shouldn't have let that slide.

And my biggest gripe was the CTF. Don't get me wrong, the idea is awesome, but you should really get into the code again and fix some textlines, because you mention ONLY AFTER I had cracked the last .dec file that the passwords need to be seperated with an underscore. NOWHERE BEFORE THAT could I have figured that one out, BUT A NEW PLAYER NEEDS TO KNOW THAT, because they couldn't crack the file otherwise (you know, combination of all passwords that worked before).

Also, it felt aprupt how the expansion ended. I don't know how the other path would've gone but I felt like there was no real conclusion to this. Maybe because you got another one already in the oven? Who knows.

Thanks for keeping me entertained for two hours though. It was fun.