NITE Team 4 review

It will take you 14 minutes to read this review.

Following the debut of their paranormal investigation series The Black Watchmen in 2015, Alice & Smith have clearly not been content to rest on their laurels. Their initial success has spurred the creation of a genre-spanning “extended universe” of titles that exist in and flesh out a shared gameworld in which elite clandestine agents face off against the forces of the occult. The latest such entry is NITE Team 4, a hacking simulator that manages to combine realistic cyber-skullduggery with a twisting, turning story set in The Black Watchmen’s universe.

The basic premise is that you are a member of the Black Watchmen’s signals intelligence and cyberwarfare arm, known as NITE (Network Intelligence & Technical Evaluation) Team 4. As such, you support the rest of the agency by providing digital surveillance, network infiltration, and stealing vital information from (or planting viruses on) targets across cyberspace. In short, you’re a hacker, and the game does a fantastic job of making you feel like one, with a huge number of assignments and a surprisingly wide variety of mission types to tackle in the main game alone, with even more optional content available to players who want to dive deeper into this cloak-and-dagger world.

Once you have created a free account and logged in, NITE Team 4 presents a sizeable set of ‘Academy’ missions that get you up to speed on the different tasks, tools, and features used to complete objectives. Each is divided into phases, and you must finish the goals in one phase before moving to the next one, providing a well-organized introduction to what would otherwise be (and sometimes still is) an overwhelming amount of information. You begin with a basic overview of the graphical user interface, known as Stinger OS, and work your way through each tool and technique, culminating in a full-fledged mission in which you must locate a journalist being targeted by a rival group of hackers.

This introductory assignment does a good job of showcasing the diversity of tasks and demonstrating the pacing and flow of gameplay that you can expect to find throughout. It’s clear from the start that, though tech-savvy players will likely find many of the techniques second nature, even those without any programming experience can climb the learning curve required to play. For instance, let’s hypothetically say that your task is to uncover more details about a company where a character you are investigating works. Armed only with the company’s website address, using the ‘DNS & VHost Mapping’ tool you might input the URL (https://www.example.com) into the DOS-style terminal window along with a set of commands to search for subdomains or the exact IP address it can be found at. Like every aspect of the game, this tool runs in what is essentially ‘real time’, so the deeper you instruct it to search, the longer it takes to find information. All of these searches are simulated, even when you instruct them to scour real-world search engines like Google and Bing.

Gathering such information is typically in service of accessing servers, so the next step is usually to seek vulnerabilities that can be exploited for the purposes of bypassing a server’s security protocols. Once this is done, using a tool called Foxacid allows you to attempt to gain entry to the server using the security vulnerabilities as a backdoor. Once inside the network, you then typically must ‘map’ the internal network to find a particular internal server or computer, plant an infected file, or steal data.

Other tasks include using XKEYSCORE to find hidden connections between data you’ve collected, such as an employee who works for two companies at the same time, by dragging and dropping entities into the search tool and running a cross-reference. Cell-phone hacking software and other programs that enable you to perform Man-in-the-Middle eavesdropping, and control drones or access satellite imagery are among the bevy of tools you will learn how to use, along with two other standout functions that deserve their own mention.

It is possible to run password attacks by entering what you know about the target to decrease the time it would otherwise take to brute-force a solution, although the latter is possible if necessary. These attacks are generally useful when a server has no vulnerabilities but you know the email address or other relevant account information and personal details such as friends, acquaintances, and current or former employers, to name just a few. This too runs in real time, displaying an estimated length to completion based on how many password databases are to be searched and how much additional information about the target is entered. The longest search I encountered was an hour, but that is an extreme outlier; most finish in a few minutes at most, and typically within a few seconds. It’s an interesting and admirably realistic part of the experience (enhanced by the inclusion of real-world password databases such as John the Ripper), though no doubt one that requires exercising a fair bit of patience. I found it immersive enough that it didn’t bother me.

The Social Engineering Toolkit is especially clever, and as my favorite tool it didn’t get used enough for my taste. Essentially, it allows you to send mass emails to a corporation in the hopes that someone there will open it and infect their system with a payload that grants you access to the network. This is largely used in situations similar to the password attack tool, when a server has no vulnerabilities. Using knowledge about the company you already possess, you craft an email template with a subject line and attachment type that is most likely to induce someone to open it. For instance, if you are dealing with a company that’s currently hiring, you might tailor the email with a subject line mentioning an application, and an attachment type in the form of an infected Word document. Once the attack is launched, the GUI shows you the progress of the attack and whether it is ultimately successful.

While all of this no doubt sounds complex, and in many ways it is, the game does an excellent job of easing you into the way these features work and detailing what you can do with them, your agency “handlers” providing voice-over guidance along the way. It can take some time to figure out what steps to do before others, or what to do when a particular avenue of inquiry isn’t revealing the information you seek, but the general workflow became second nature to me as I gained familiarity with the tools and missions in the main storyline. Even the text-based nature of most of these tools is easier to manage than you might expect. Anyone who abhors the idea of significant amounts of typing will probably find NITE Team 4 a frustrating experience, but various shortcuts make things easier, such as using the tab key to autocomplete commands and (previously used) URLs, a simple design consideration that surprisingly saves a lot of repetition.

Where many hacking simulators tend to abandon realism for a movie-style experience, NITE Team 4 feels extremely genuine while still retaining a definite “cool factor.” I’m impressed by how well Alice & Smith have been able to combine a realistic hacking experience with flashes of cinematic, even sci-fi, atmosphere. Helping to accomplish this is the choice to base the game’s fictional tools on real-world ones. Foxacid and XKEYSCORE, in particular, are essentially gamified versions of real NSA surveillance and intelligence-gathering tools revealed by the Snowden leaks, although the interface is no doubt improved for a slicker, more immersive look and feel.

Not everything is perfectly executed, but problems are very minor, such as the need to redo a long string of text if you mistype a command. In addition, using XKEYSCORE can devolve into try-everything-on-everything until you discover the hidden connection. It’s a situation that thankfully doesn’t crop up that often, but some clues require such careful scrutiny that it can be easy to miss a helpful bit of information to narrow down the possibilities.

That said, there is such a wide variety of mission types that issues like these feel like nitpicking. Even the repetitive nature of the player’s role – what should be the death-knell for any game, and especially a hacking simulator – never felt like it covered quite the same ground twice, nor did it become boring. This may be partly influenced somewhat by my interest in hacking simulators, but it is notable that other hacking sims typically lose my interest after some time, while NITE Team 4 did not.

Some of the credit for this also goes to the plot that ties the Story Mode together. There are a total of four “Operations” divided into multiple chapters, with multiple objectives or missions within each chapter. While saying very much about the narrative would be spoiling, you begin by investigating who is responsible for an incident in which military-grade malware is stolen from NITE Team 4. While at first it seems like an ordinary case of cyber-espionage, it soon becomes evident that much more is at stake. While it stands on its own for newcomers, the story will likely intrigue The Black Watchmen players especially, with references sprinkled throughout and plot points cleverly tied in to the overall Black Watchmen universe. Tasks include tracking down a target’s vehicle by drone, hacking into various fictional companies and other entities, and even infiltrating a “dark web” organization by posing as a freelance hacker.

While I generally enjoyed how the plot unfolded, there were times I found it hard to follow, perhaps because such a heavy focus on the gameplay meant that the storyline, intentionally or otherwise, took a backseat to solving the objective at hand. It’s not so much that there is a disconnect between the gameplay and the story, but rather that it is all too easy to become focused on completing assignments and lose sight of how everything ties together. Other players may have no trouble keeping track, but I struggled at times to piece together the significance of certain events and plot twists. It all came back together by the end despite these issues, but it is a problem I also noticed during my time with The Black Watchmen, and came to similar conclusions as to the reason for it.

At the end of a few missions are “critical actions” in which you must choose what to do, such as whether to order a drone strike on a target. I can’t say whether or not this changes anything narratively significant, since the only way to replay a Story mission is apparently to reset the entire game. However, your actions do influence how well-regarded you are by various intelligence agencies around the world, based on the effects of your course of action. For instance, high collateral damage in a target country might decrease your influence with one or more agencies, while low collateral damage might increase your influence. There are various trade-offs that have to be considered, and this can lead to a feeling of tension as you decide what must be done.

There are also a few pure logic puzzles sprinkled throughout, highly reminiscent of the kinds of challenges that are the bread and butter of The Black Watchmen, with brief excursions to the internet yielding clues as to how to solve them. These puzzles, one of which involves studying acquired biometric data in order to figure out how to infiltrate a network, clearly serve to break up the hacking simulation monotony, but are very well-integrated into the experience and do not feel superfluous at all. While perhaps not necessary, they are welcome additions to the game and I enjoyed them.

During the game you are accompanied by several characters in the form of disembodied voices that communicate with you via the Stinger OS terminal. The most ubiquitous are Catherine Wheeler (a character familiar to players of The Black Watchmen) and Dylan Voorhees, both of whom narrate chapter introductions and serve a number of purposes in assisting and guiding you. The voice-overs are generally solid, though at times they literally sound like actors reading their lines and several phrases are actually voiced the way they appear on-screen, typos and all. For example, a phrase that should be “a whole lot more complicated” is written “a whole more complicated,” and voiced exactly as such. It’s a mild gripe, to be sure, but the effect is jarring enough that it’s surprising to me that these mistakes weren’t caught and corrected. Also, despite there being few serious time constraints except for vehicle tracking sequences and one section near the end, the characters will occasionally urge you to “work quickly,” presumably in a bid to heighten the tension. Instead, these encouragements did the opposite of what they are supposed to do, making me acutely aware that there is no time limit. Again, a minor issue, but it might have been better not to draw attention to the fact.

Open world missions are optional assignments that unlock in the main game approximately each month, at no additional charge to players. Based on real-world cyber security scenarios, these missions require you to do research on the internet (Google searches, that is, not actual hacking, of course) and then bring back what you find into the game. They are very similar to the way puzzles in The Black Watchmen work, but instead of internet research being the main focus of these missions (as in Black Watchmen), here your research yields the knowledge necessary to hack a target. I found them generally more difficult than the main story missions, and thus more time consuming, but the combination of puzzle styles is an interesting feature. Due to the increased challenge, however, an attendant increase in frustration kept me from fully enjoying them in large doses.

Other optional objectives called “Bounties” are quick, time-sensitive hacking jobs for various intelligence agencies around the world. These come and go on a rotational basis, and are available only for a defined period of time, from a few minutes to a few hours. The difficulty of these missions varies, the challenge seemingly rising with the amount of time you have to solve them. Succeeding in these changes your influence level with each spy agency involved. Completing a mission for one agency against another understandably increases your reputation with the first while decreasing it with the other. Like the Hivemind intel feature, the question of what purpose the reputation mechanic actually has on the game remains unanswered at this point. In any case, the bounty feature is enjoyable overall, especially when you just want a quick dose of hacking gameplay.

The player-made missions (requiring the “Network Administrator” DLC to create) located in what is called the Hivemind Network are a bit of a mystery. For the purposes of review I waded into this part of the game, but even as I solved a few of them, I didn’t really understand their purpose. It seems that you are supposed to hack into these networks, and for doing so you get access to a “marketplace” where you can use points or credits (which are, at this stage, finite and unreplaceable) to buy “intel.” What, exactly, can be done with this intel is unclear, however.

Although I personally found the presence of music to be somewhat distracting and muted it for much of my playthrough, the soundtrack itself is excellent. There are, in fact, two parts, the first composed by DORO Music and the second by Douglas Holmquist. Part 1 is around 30 minutes long and contains two downtempo ambient tunes and a pair of tense orchestral tracks, while Part 2 is nearly an hour long and is a single, morphing techno-ambient composition. Both scores are great, and quite appropriate for the game’s cyberpunk atmosphere. An audio menu option allows you to switch between the two. I appreciate being given the choice but take issue with the implementation, as the player is given no indication of what the alternative soundtrack is, and the change is so subtle at first that it is hard to notice anything is even different.

Sound effects are likewise excellent, and can be heard almost everywhere in the game. From electronic bloops and blips that accompany the launch (and closure) of the programs in your toolkit, to the dramatic fanfares that herald the completion of an objective, to the ever-present voice of FAY, the artificial intelligence platform that apparently underlies the system on which you perform your duties as a NITE Team 4 agent, the soundscape is surprisingly rich and immersive for what is at its core a DOS-style text parser housed within a fancy graphical environment. I enjoyed it immensely, finding it heightened the feeling of being a futuristic cyber-spy.

Here too there are only minor drawbacks, mainly that FAY’s monotone announcements (that you have opened one of your tools or begun an intrusion attempt, for instance) become extremely repetitive before long. Alleviating this somewhat is the ability to disable voice-overs when activating subsequent instances of a tool that’s already open (when, say, gathering information about two servers at the same time), but it would have been nice to completely switch off FAY’s tool announcements entirely. The AI’s voice-overs are also idiosyncratically applied, with some tools being called out by name upon being opened (“Foxacid server connection initiated”) and others heralded simply by stating their function (“Information gathering module initiated.”) Other tools, inexplicably, open with no voice-over announcement at all. While I admit that this is essentially more quibbling over minor details, it is a noticeable and inexplicable area where a lack of polish is evident.

Graphically NITE Team 4 resembles a high-tech computer desktop, with a menu for selecting tools and programs on the left-hand side, shortcuts to various important tools at the bottom, and an icon tray on the right that allows you to switch between multiple desktops and to drag and drop tool windows between them. Although things can get quite messy with multiple tools open at one time (an inevitability, due to having multiple avenues of investigation for a given task), it is possible to organize things so that you can have, say, information gathering tools on one desktop, XKEYSCORE on another, and so on. Most tools open into simple text-based windows, but the few that have their own GUIs look appropriately futuristic.

It is possible to unlock customizations for the interface, such as new color schemes, iconographic avatars and frames to represent the player (visible in the upper left of the desktop) and dress up the overall look and feel. Such options are numerous and represent a rather superfluous but enjoyable aspect of the game. Various conditions enable different features, and some appear to be so special they can only be unlocked once or not at all, such as watching a developer Twitch stream or backing the game’s development on Kickstarter.

The interface itself is controlled using a mixture of keyboard and mouse, and in general it works well. Some features, such as the Turbine C2 Registry (basically all the available servers you have hacked), are accessed and used via mouse, while most tools can either be opened using the left-hand menu or by typing the name of the tool into an open window, in which case a new window will launch.

There is one feature that I did not test at all, and that is the multiplayer option available for both Story Mode and the Hivemind network. At time of writing, a message still warned that this feature is in beta, and as such you may encounter “game breaking” bugs or glitches, with the only recourse to be to reset your game entirely. It seems to be a way for players to collaborate on missions in similar fashion to a proposed but never properly implemented feature in The Black Watchmen. If you do not wish to enable this feature, as I didn’t, you still have plenty of options for collaboration with fellow players, including forums and a Discord server.

Combining realistic, text-based tools with touches of futuristic flair, NITE Team 4 succeeds at creating a hacking simulator that feels quite grounded while putting the player in the cyber-warfare hotseat. The story is interesting in its own right, even if it does occasionally get lost among the string of immersive objectives. While the complex gameplay can be a handful with its numerous NSA-inspired tools, network intrusion, and data-gathering, the experience never feels overwhelming, rewarding players with the satisfying sense of being an elite hacker while minimizing the feeling of repetition, even seamlessly including some logic puzzles for a change of pace. Certain gameplay features lack a final bit of polish or a clear purpose, but given that the Academy and Story Mode missions alone provide over 25 hours of combined content that remains fresh to the end, with new and recurring standalone missions on top of that, this game is a must-have for every fan of Alice & Smith or hacker sims in general, serving as a great introduction to the genre for curious players looking for something out of the ordinary.