Simple action game
Hard Life is a game of squares fighting for dominance against a stripped-down background. It’s officially still under development, but the last update came out in 2019.
Too simple for most
Hard Life has you assuming the form of a yellow rectangle fighting its way through the sea of red opponents. Your goal is to kill all of them to progress.
As you make your way to each new level, your tasks become more difficult. The challenges increase with different outlines of the terrain and more numerous opponents coming after you.
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Graphics
The look of this game is as simple as it gets. It features Microsoft Paint-style design of cartoonish rectangles against a grey grid, colours and facial expressions of different squares showing you which ones you should kill.
The mild cartoon violence that takes place each time you remove an opponent is a breath of fresh air, but it dies out soon enough.
Gameplay
You play this game solo on your PC. Four main controls are available to you, and they determine everything that happens on the screen.
The keyboard arrows move your character around the map, and pressing Z lets you shoot at your opponents. Click F4, and you’ll enter fullscreen mode, and ESC will close the game for you. If you were hoping for simple, yet cohesive, fighting games, try Dragon Ball FighterZ or Street Fighter II instead.
Newest updates
The developer came out with the newest additions to this free game last year, when he shared the game’s playful OST and added a new opponent to the mix. They also fixed most of the game’s bugs, ensuring that what exists runs as smoothly as possible.
Unfortunately, the Game Jolt page hasn’t seen many updates since. Hard Life doesn’t seem finished yet, but the online records aren’t announcing any new elements, leaving the players with only the lightweight, 9MB app that’s already available.
Not impressive
While Hard Life can serve as a nice little pastime, it’s far from impressive even from Indie arcade games. It resembles minigames from the early 2000s, and even the little enjoyment you get from it has a short life.
