Odyssey Hacking Playthrough

I'm going to go through the motions and do a play-through of the new hacking mini-game.  My thoughts on the subject are in another post.  As such I will try to keep my annoyances to a minimum.  Let's begin!

You've finally scanned down the relic or data site and approach the debris.  Upon targeting and locking said debris, you activate one of two hacking modules (depending on the site you are in) after which you will be presented with this

1.  This is your virus, on the left side is health, on the right side is its strength.

2.  This is your starting position.

3.  You may only activate nodes that are highlighted.

4.  These are unexplored nodes, who knows what secrets they may hold.

Not knowing where you need to go, what things you should work around, or even where helpful power  ups are.  There is only one thing left to do.....MINDLESS CLICKING!

and even MORE CLICKING!

and after some MORE CLICKING, you need to halt, because what's this?  A sneaky defensive node that you had no idea was there, which is cutting off access to some of the nodes.  We have two options available, one we attack it greatly gimping our virus, (and we don't even know what those nodes that it is blocking have) or we ignore it and keep CLICKING!

WOOO, a small token of success.  We have found a repair power up, with this we can add a bit more life to our virus.  Make sure to pick it up before clicking anymore nodes because if the next node you click is a defensive node it will cut off all access to the repair power up.

While we continue to click nodes we access a data cache.  NEVER touch these unless you are out of options.  The reason for this is that they can contain power ups OR defensive nodes that can shut progress down.  If it is your final option then getting a defensive node hurts a whole lot less.

Well it's a good thing we didn't touch that data cache because if it had been a defensive node we would have been in trouble.  Because what we have here is the system core.  You need to attack and kill this to be able to have a successful hack.  There is no point in going and clicking on the other nodes because discovering other things gains you no benefit, and you might run across the defensive node the reduces your virus' attack by 1/2.  That could make things extremely more difficult to kill the system core.

Before I attack the node let's consider a few things, if I had attacked the first defensive node I came across to gain access to those 2 nodes it was guarding it would have taken 3 clicks to kill it, and you would have taken 40 damage.  Of which would have been a waste because as we can see the system core isn't located in either of those 2 nodes.  If we had also accessed the data cache and a defensive node was there we would have had to kill that to get to the core, and if we had used our repair power up, we would have been left with ~10 life left which isn't enough to kill the system core.  So guess what?  The hack fails. 

These types of situations might look a little bit like this

But since we didn't do any of those things, I'm going to activate the repair power up to show what it does and attack the system node.

Clicking one more time on the system core destroys it, giving us access to all the loot inside.  HURRAY!!!  Congratulations, you're a winner, here's your reward.

Wait.....wha?!?!?!?! 

That's right boyo not only did you have to slog your way through a mini-game where it is completely random whether you win or lose.  You now have to chase the loot as it drifts away. (Most of it will be garbage)  Huh....you didn't bring a friend along to sit around and do nothing until the loot tries to run away?  Well...sucks to be you.

At least with slot machines you don't need to chase them down.  Just look at those little guys begin to spread out.

To sum up

·         Power Up location = unknown

·         Data Cache location = unknown

·         Defensive Node location = unknown

·         System Core location = unknown

·         Canister containing loot = unknown

So I guess it's just the luck of the draw, kind of reminds me of the old system.

Odyssey has yet to be released and is subject to change.  (Based on how close the release date is, it's not likely)