Nameless: the Hackers RPG

No longer available in the App Store

Nameless is a brilliant graphic novel/JRPG-style game that has been custom built for the touchscreen iPhone, so is very slick and responsive and perfect for playing with one hand. You play as a group of four hackers who are off to uncover a huge global conspiracy. Nameless is crammed with hacking pop culture references, from “Mt. Fox” to “ByteCredits” or “BC”. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get all the references, but those that do will enjoy them. Old school Mac gamers may also be reminded of Uplink. One innovation with Nameless is that only one character hits per battle turn, but you can choose which character. They share a pool of energy, so you can use the same one every time if you want to.

Nameless has two in-game currencies: the aforementioned BC which is essentially money, and also RP – or research points – that you use to level up your skills. You also have to find InfoCards which allow you to buy a new health level or extra skill level, as well as boosting your attributes (from Attack and Defence to Luck and finding extra BC). Each InfoCard has four “slots” that are either OK (bright green) or missing, with each slot contributing extra attribute boosts. Obviously you’ll want 4/4 for each card, and the way to do this is to find better ones or re-roll the ones you have at a cost of 25BC (though they can get worse as well as better, so make sure you have a stash of BC to re-roll with).

Difficulty-wise Nameless is relatively easy in its early stage, with grinding not too intensive (you’ll want to grind for BC and RP to re-roll and raise stats). But by the end you’ll probably need to grind quite intensively to prepare for the final battle. It’s still nowhere near as soul destroying as the average KRPG, thankfully. My tips: never buy/use energy or health items (to save BC). Instead, find easier battles and use them to heal up (“Recover Data”) and steal energy from enemies to recharge your metre. Also use the Data Mine skill every battle, you’ll end up with a lot more items. I managed to play the entire game pretty much relying on Jayden’s Packet Flood as a weapon, but the final battle demands more strategy.