A startling example of misguided nostalgia as a marketing ploy
Take, for example, Hard Reset. Even if you've never read any of the previews/interviews/articles about the game, it just takes 30 minutes or so of play to realize where it's aiming at: a cross between Serious Sam-inspired gameplay and a classic cyberpunk setting. Sounds great when put that way, but for such a combination to work, it requires a careful blend of what made both that gameplay and that kind of setting attractive - and Hard Reset is the kind of game that didn't really grasp it.
It's easy to think of Serious Sam as a fast-paced, incredibly hard game 'nothing like those shooters nowadays', but in truth, it would've miserably failed to impress if it didn't had a lot more to it. Serious Sam had character, functional controls, wide open spaces designed to mesh with its crowd-control gunplay options and, more importantly, was innovative for its time - it didn't become the classic it is by feeding on nostalgia alone.
Hard Reset, unfortunately, goes the easy route. It's fast and it's hard, sure, but for the most part that's all it has to offer. The setting, while brilliantly rendered, is as derivative of Blade Runner as a game can be - a perfect example of execution over creativity, as if one had the best designer but no art director or pro writer to work with. While it's normal to expect certain genre tropes and cliches to surface in a cyberpunk setting, Hard Reset goes out of its way to include *all* of them - both in visual and (meager) narrative terms - and never expands on their particular premises. You get the hard-boiled, rebel-without-a-cause law enforcer as a protagonist; the usual drivel about megacorporations; the overabundance of propaganda; and the fear of scientific improvements leading to unethical practices. But none of these tropes goes nowhere; it's all just there for show and 'genre authenticy'.
We all know such a game probably doesn't really need a powerful story or a detailed world; but it still does need character, especially when so much effort is put in style and execution. Concentrating and expanding on a single idea, even one so overused as 'the robots are revolting!' (yeah, that's in the game too), would've served the game more than checking all items possible in a laundry list of cyberpunk tropes just for the sake of it.
There's also a great disconnection between the game's intended fast-paced action and the resources actually given to the player, as well as the play areas where all that action takes place. For starters, this is pretty much a straightforward corridor shooter; it features the kind of level design most suited for a battle of wits against rich AI-enabled adversaries seeking cover and trying to ferret you out of yours, not a mob of robots always running blindly towards you and the like.
Also, weapons are not really separate entities but upgrades to two basic devices, which makes it all the more clunky to select one: for example, if you want a grenade launcher, you need to select the bullet-based device and then the fire sub-type you're looking for. This process can be frustrating when you quickly need the guns that are more suitable for crowd control purposes, especially if you're using a controller (which isn't, by the way, such a strange proposition since this game is all about speed rather than precision).
In both cases, Hard Reset is once more failing to capture the strengths of its intended inspirations. Serious Sam worked because it offered plenty of large spaces for the crowd control stuff, as well as a quick selection of weapons to deal with specific opponents; it was, effectively, a sandbox of destruction, throwing the player with a lot of tools in a large arena full of contenders and letting him/her hone personal skills to find unique ways to conquer the challenge. Hard Reset, for the most part, just throws a mob in a corridor and expects you to find the exploding things in the setting to solve the equation, and that's it.
And when it finally begins to expand its possibilities, when the player has a number of upgrades and starts to reliably face opponents from varied distances... It abruptly ends. There's no problem in it being a shorter game, specially at budget pricing - as an old-timer close to his forties, I find it to be a blessing these days - but flow is still essential: Hard Reset is a short game with a slow progression, which leaves the impression it was supposed to be longer but was suddenly rushed to completion.
In a sense, Hard Reset shows the worst of both worlds: it brings to the fore modern-shooter design tropes with none of their redeeming features or counterpoints - such as no real AI to contend with in its narrow spaces - and tries to 'patch' those tropes with the bare bones from old classics and none of their meat. It's the kind of design mentality that has become painfully common these days among indie developers (specially on the PC market), where the *absence* of features seems more important than how the chosen features combine in the overall design. It's like saying the absence of a classic literary structure is what makes comics great, or that the comparatively limited budget of theater makes it more relevant than movies; either claim is not only misguided and counterproductive, but a disservice to what makes each form of expression unique.
And that's how Hard Reset feels: a disservice to what made games such as Duke Nukem 3D or Serious Sam great, while using the dismissal of any redeeming quality of modern design solutions to shooters as a desperate marketing ploy for attention. The fact that it does have potential in places, such as the clever use of environmental damage or the intricate upgrade system, makes it all the more disappointing; when compared to games which did use such features to great effect, such as Bulletstorm or Deus Ex: Human Revolution, it just makes it clear the designers of Hard Reset were more occupied trying to prove a point than to effectively make a truly unique game. Here's hoping that their next game relies less on nostalgia and more on creativity.