Hektik was another budget release by the UK software publisher Mastertronic in 1984 at a knock down £1.99 price.
As mentioned before the standard of these budget titles varied tremedously from the horrific Bionic Granny which I talked about here
https://steemit.com/retro/@metallica73/c64-game-memories-revisited-30-years-later-bionic-granny-worst-game-ever
to titles like Booty and todays game called Hektik which was a very good clone of the early arcade adventure Space Panic, which itself was very similar to Lode Runner.
Hektik will look prehistoric to anybody born after 1990, but this is a seriously addictive and playable clone. It was very hard, the basic idea is you dig holes to make the aliens fall into then you have to fill it in to kill them. If you didn't kill them in time the aliens (monsters?) become more powerful. It was just hard enough to make you want to keep playing.
As stated, it was graphically very simple and the sound effect were minimal. It's very difficult if you were not around in that era to look back at early C64's and dismiss them because they look so basic. In my opinion you have to compare games against their peers at the time of release.
Graphically Bionic Granny & Hektik are absolutely abysmal by todays standards, but one is really leaps and bounds ahead in terms of gameplay. Something that still plagues gaming today is non-existent game mechanics at the expense of graphics.
Another odd thing to think about is how a certain genre takes hold in a particular era of gaming and gets copied over and over. There were many games like this released in the mid 80's because of the popularity of the game in the Arcades.