Hard Nova is a role playing game that features a cyberpunk theme in the distant future. It was developed by Malibu Interactive and published by Electronic Arts, a firm more familiar with sporting games, in the early nineties. While it was most popular for the personal computer, it also saw action on the Amiga and the Atari systems. It is the unofficial sequel to Sentinel Worlds: The Future of Magic, another science fiction role playing game. Hard Nova is basically a role playing game, but it also has elements of puzzle solving and some action sequences.
It is a single player game that plays from the third person perspective (top down view) but also has some first person three dimensional scenes.
In Sentinel Worlds, the user played the part of a Federation Officer. In Hard Nova, the opportunities before you are greatly opened up because the user will control a group of technologically advanced, futuristic mercenary soldiers. Without the need to abide by the law, the missions become much more fun and diversified. The user can select from male and female mercenaries. The only drawback to hiring mercenaries to join the team is the fact that the contracts are permanent. Once a mercenary is hired into the squad, he or she cannot be dismissed. Still, the user has the
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ability to choose the skills that each member of the squad can learn, as is true to most role playing games. Therefore, mistakes can be corrected in hiring by teaching poor choices of mercenaries some very useful skills. There are also a great variety of ways in which a character can gain experience points, so just because a character is useless in aerial dogfights does not mean that he won’t be able to gain some experience points in ground melee battles and so forth.
There are a great number of non-playing characters that also help to add depth to the game. There were a great number of them, portrayed on the map as dots, in Sentinel Worlds, and Hard Nova expands on what worked and offered even more. These characters come with their own profiles and portraits, which can be seen when the user mousse over their dots.
Hard Nova is an entertaining science fiction play that will satisfy most any gaming enthusiast. It is a nice spin on the stereotypical fantasy role playing game and offers a lot of varied missions and skills for the mercenaries to learn. Overall, it is a fun, highly underrated science fiction game that makes for a great download.
