[Review] NITE Team 4: An all-too-real military hacking sim, if you're into that kinda thing

The struggle is real with this sim, but then there was the time I identified a bad guy's house by hacking into his smart grill and spotted a spike in temperature through a drone's thermal camera.

I was about to quit NITE Team 4. I had enjoyed the hours I’d poured into the game, meticulously cracking into and then crawling through forbidden networks, uncovering the tiniest clue about where to go next. But after so many missions it was starting to feel repetitive and, worse, the roadblocks were repetitive as well.

As I learned more than a decade ago struggling through a computer science minor, sometimes when you’re coding a program it just… doesn’t work. There’s no explanation, no hints, nothing at all to help you identify what you’d done wrong. It’s the worst. My college roommates quickly learned that “segmentation fault” were the most devastating words in the English language.

Such is the case with NITE Team 4, which offers a generous tutorial section, but after that often leaves you to your own devices with only vague mission statements. So when I brute forced my way to a stolen password belonging to a villainous hacking crew, I was proud, until I realized I had no idea what to do with it. I’d forgotten what I was looking for in the first place, much less where it could be in the maze of linked servers. So I started doing random stuff — a network analysis here, a social engineering campaign there, a man-in-the-middle attack for no real reason — as I’d done many times before, knowing I would eventually hit the right combination of hacking tools and targets by sheer luck. Brute forcing again. It was exhausting.

And then, just as I was about to turn the game off and offer it a “pretty good” kind of review, a curveball came. My squad, which had been basically untouchable up to that point, had been tricked into downloading malware of its own. The screen did that great digital stutter thing and the sound pitched and waned and altered voices of characters started quoting from what I think were old British histories. The system survived the attack, but it was severely degraded and, therefore, forced the use of a new operating system module thingy, with several of my usual tools disabled or altered. And it was just the refresh I needed to power through the rest of the game. Looked cool as hell too.

NITE Team 4, which came out back in 2019, describes itself as a military hacking sim. And while I don’t have any experience whatsoever in that kind of thing, I did cover cybersecurity for much of my career, and I can say that at the very least, the game does an impressive job of looking how I think all that would look — even if maybe the graphics are suspiciously slick. The devotion to realism, at least as far as I can judge it, is total: As a newly hired member of a military white hat hacking organization, you’ll work with or against dozens of high-profile and not-so-high-profile American and foreign signals intelligence agencies, you’ll use real-life hacking and surveillance tools — like XKEYSCORE of Edward Snowden fame — and your missions will be based on real-world incidents, like that time America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ teamed up to strategize about how to listen to suspected terrorist communications in World of Warcraft [PDF].

It’s so real, and the tone of it is so oddly earnest and official-sounding, that it almost resembles a recruitment gambit more than anything else, recalling the US-military-made first-person-shooter America’s Army. But as far as I can tell, the designers, Canadian firm Alice & Smith who bill themselves as a “transmedia storytelling studio,” have just devoted themselves to immersive gameplay in this and other games — often breaking far outside the fourth wall of a computer screen. (In 2018 the company did announce a deal with a Canadian transportation association to use the game for training purposes.)

Hacking games are, in general, difficult to pull off because there’s no real way to get around the fact that you’re staring at a series of terminal windows almost the whole time. Games that leave the screen to be bigger than that, like Watch Dogs, tend to end up just being normal games with some simplistic “hacking” minigames on the side. That’s not to say it’s impossible to make an engaging hacking game. I found NITE Team 4 after I had played Hacknet, a stripped down version of the same kind of idea, and I adored Hacknet. (It also had the benefit of a more engaging storyline and overall had more of a fun edge to it, but thems the breaks.)

The way NITE Team 4 gets through this limitation is to widen the scope of things you can do as a hacker with the resources of a very wealthy nation-state at your back. Most of the missions begin by probing a particular domain name for subdomains that haven’t been properly configured, allowing that vital crack in the wall. (Don’t yawn!) After that, things get far more interesting, whether you’re cracking the cell phone of a company’s IT officer to read their messages, monitoring particular wifi usage to figure out the pattern of life for people coming and going from an office, or, in a couple cases, trailing suspects via drone feed.

One example I have to highlight (and a spoiler warning for this paragraph): There’s a mission in which you have discovered the identity and general location of a bad guy in Berlin, but not exactly where his home is. But you know that he has a smart home and a grill connected to it. So, you hack into to the servers of the smart home service, find his account, turn on the grill, and then watch for a heat spike through a circling drone’s thermal cameras. Tic-tac-toe, there’s your man. It’s an incredible feeling of cleverness, even if the game did lead you by the hand for most of that. Certainly the most unrealistic part of the game immediately followed: You, as a junior cyber ops officer, are given the decision whether or not to launch a missile from the drone at this guy in a Berlin suburb. (I did not drone him.)

It’s those moments of “aha!” that are the reason these kinds of games exist and, I have to say, they feel very good, especially if it comes after I’ve been banging my head against a problem for the past 15 minutes. Revelation is the coin of this cyber realm. But that’s a very delicate balance to keep, and I’ll admit I turned to an online walkthrough several times when it seemed like nothing I did would make any progress. My kingdom for a hint system.

Overall, this is one of those reviews where I praise the game as something I, personally, enjoyed immensely, but I’m not certain I can recommend it just generally. I’ve had this problem before. This is about as far as you can get from the action of your usual AAA videogame entry or even the tight mechanics and gorgeous art of an indie darling. NITE Team 4 does, however, nail the “hacker ascetic,” music and sound design, which do a lot of heavy lifting.

That’s partly how the game does an incredible job of making terminal commands exciting, and that alone deserves praise. It also offers such a realistic take on the broader world of security, including what I’m pretty sure was a very obscure reference to the Iraqi defector Curveball in a throwaway inaccessible filename, that if you’re a cybersecurity nerd or just a national security fanatic, you should probably login asap.

And if you’re neither of those, still maybe check if your phone’s hotspot turned on without you telling it to. That can be a bad sign.

PS: There’s a part near the end in which you trick an AI into helping you hack into a newer version of itself, and with the ChatGPT stuff that’s been going on, I’m not sure how I feel about that.