These days you’d be hard pressed to find a first person shooter that doesn’t resort to the current norm of cover based, infinite regenerating health standard. It seems the days of searching out med kits and carrying ridiculous numbers of weapons is a thing of the past, a part of the first person shooter heritage that will be left behind in favour of current trends. Still there are some who dare to flirt with the old ways and the developers behind Hard Reset, namely Flying Wig Hog (consisting of many people who made Painkiller), are just those people. Whilst Hard Reset isn’t strictly an old fashioned shooter there are some throwbacks to the old ways with some of the new mixed in for good measure.
Hard Reset throws you into a post-apocalyptic world where humanity has been driven to the brink of extinction, pushed back into a single city called The Sanctuary by an enemy of their own creation: the machines. Inside the Sanctuary is a repository of billions of human identities, ostensibly those who were killed in the war that resulted in humanity being in the state that it is in. The machines want to assimilate those memories into their core matrix and as such have been assaulting the Sanctuary relentlessly. You play as Fletcher, a member of a team called CLN who’s job it is to protect humanity from the machines. Things start to get hairy when the machines break through the barrier and begin assaulting the Sanctuary directly.
The setting in Hard Reset is most aptly described as a cyberpunk’s wet dream, being a combination of post-apocalyptic drab combined with dazzling neon colours with Japanese characters littering the landscape. It’s definitely not the most pretty of games, especially when compared to other recent releases like Rage and Battlefield 3, but it’s far from being visually boring like many other generic shooters tend to be. Trouble is that many of the enemies in the game are also visually similar to the world that surrounds them which can make it somewhat frustrating at times.
Combat in Hard Reset is a mixed affair swinging between the dizzying highs of laying waste to hoards of enemies and the frustrating lows of replay a section over and over again because of some surprise tactics that will one shot you. You’re given 2 weapons to start off with the CLG, a typical machine gun weapon, and the NRG, a futuristic energy weapon that streams out balls of plasma. Both of these weapons can be upgraded to become another type of weapon (which you can change on demand) with the CLG being projectile based (shotgun, rocket launcher, mines, etc) and the NRG being energy based (shock field, railgun and a “smart weapon” which I’ll touch on shortly). You can also upgrade your combat armour giving you other abilities like a radar or additional damage resistance.
Now here’s where I’ll admit to finding Hard Reset and absolute chore to play until I got the smart gun upgrade. You see the initial incarnations of your weapons are ridiculously weak with even the weakest of enemies needing a thorough thrashing with them before they’ll keel over. The NRG upgrade that creates an electric shock field mitigated this somewhat but it was still extremely tedious to set up the field, wait for it to off all the enemies inside it and then wait for the next wave to arrive. The smart weapon, an upgrade that shoots projectiles that home in on your enemies and can shoot through walls, took much of this tedium away as I could simply scan around for incoming hostiles and launch volleys at them before they could get to me. This became very helpful in the later game when boss fights (like the one pictured above) when it would lock onto the places I needed to shoot at. Granted they were pulsating orange so I wouldn’t of had trouble finding them otherwise, but the knowledge that I was guaranteed to hit the right spot made those somewhat tiresome boss fights a lot easier.
The story itself is rather thin on the ground, with the majority of it being told in slides between levels when the game is loading. There’s a little interaction between your character and some others in the game, but they’re just through poorly animated avatars in the corner of your HUD. As a medium to carry the game along it does the job adequately but it’s rather loosely strung together and the game cuts off abruptly with the trademarked “oh there could be a sequel!” cliff hanger ending that I always groan about. Then again if you’re expecting Mass Effect level of interaction and immersion from a $30 shooter than I’d be questioning your sanity.
Hard Reset is a bit of an oddity, showing many signs of the polish I’ve come to expect from much bigger budget games but also dragging with it some of the troubles of being an independently developed game. At just on 5 hours of straight up game play (with no multi-player) it was a somewhat enjoyable diversion whilst I was waiting for Christmas glut of AAA titles to start dribbling in. If you’re into the cyberpunk genre and love your action over the top then Hard Reset will be right up your alley.
Rating: 7.0/10
Hard Reset is available right on PC for $29.99 on Steam. Game was played on Hard with a grand total of around 5 hours play time.
