How to completely PWN your rivals on iOS in Combat Hacking

Who remembers the film Hackers? The early Angelina Jolie vehicle was notable for making hacking seem like a cool, exciting pastime rather than the nerdy code-crunch-fest it actually is in real life.

There was a lot of that kind of thing back in the mid-'90s, as we recall.

We were reminded of this when booting up PWN: Combat Hacking for the first time. It's a new iOS game from 82 Inc. that sees you facing off against a bunch of colourful whizz-kid rivals in a particularly flashy representation of cyberspace.

There's no boring reams of code here. Rather, out-hacking your opponent is a case of tapping a series of nodes in an interconnected grid.

The goal is to turn every last node to your colour, with speed and split second decision making the required skills instead of a degree in computer science.

Having two adjacent nodes in your possession will speed up the acquisition of mutually connected nodes, while special recharging viruses and hacking tools will give you a temporary advantage over your rival - who is attempting to do exactly the same thing to you.

There are eight elite hackers to choose from, each with their own skillsets, as you play through the game's main campaign mode.

Essentially this is a fast-paced, competitive puzzle game, so it's good to see that a Bluetooth multiplayer mode is also available.