Half-Life 2 - Hypercube: Source Game Client

Half-Life 2 - Hypercube: Source Game Client

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?

Hypercube: Source is a HL2 deathmatch mod. It takes place inside of the same cube that was seen in the moive "Cube 2: Hyperucbe". It has traps from all three cube movies, and has been designed to simulate infinite cubes in a finite number of cubes. The object of the game is to simply, get out of the cube alive, and once your out, the game is stll not over!

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.

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.