SHOOT.SHOOT.SHOOT.......and thats about it
In Hard Reset, players take control of Major Fletcher, a cyborg security specialist who is sent to quell an army of out of control robots in the huge Blade Runner-esque metropolis of Bezoar.The story is a Cyberpunk adventure where the human streets of New Bezoar are built with cold steel where product advertisements assault consumers from the walls and shine down from the sky. The world is beautiful; its vibrant with signs of the life that existed days before. There are fully realized plaza's and run down apartments. Look out any window and you'll see an impressive skybox filled with dead buildings. Routinely will you look out and be stricken by how well the entire thing was rendered.True to its roots, there are no in-engine cutscenes as the story unfolds in motion graphic comics between levels that are heavily inspired by Ashley Woods' work on his various Metal Gear Solid projects. They carry a story with some interesting ideas but often feels built of second-run cyberpunk themes; you'll get government-sponsored paranoia and human augmentation and 'the net' but it's pretty inconsequential in the long run and the end comes with little fanfare- more the end of a chapter than a story.
Hard Reset, like most European developed games, is a game that seems to have been ripped out of the 90s and somehow placed within a modern engine. While the levels do have a certain "sameness" about them, the texture and shadow work in their small confines is something that needs to be both celebrated and repeated. The sheer depth of the textures, especially considering it's a directx9 game, are far beyond anything I've seen out of the hobby in the past 5 years and even make Crysis look like an aging tech demo by comparison. It's so prominent of a difference that it would be akin to comparing a cellphone from the 90s with a cell phone you bought at the Apple store two weeks ago.
Gunplay is just as tight as you'd hope. With no cover options and a fast but short sprint, the game plays almost exactly like 2004's "Painkiller" and relies more on twitch reflexes and ammo conservation then the cover-based tactics seen in most modern shooters. This constant moving and running style of play is made even more intense by the removal of health regeneration as a whole. While your shields do recharge slowly during battle your health does not and must be maintained by hunting down HP-increasing green orbs that either drop from enemies or appear in secret locations hidden inside the map.
Which brings us to another ancient gameplay device long thought forgotten: The secret area.
Like Doom, Blood and Wolfenstein, Hard Reset has dozens of cleverly (and not so cleverly) hidden secret areas sprinkled throughout its campaign. These locked off rooms contain power-ups that are necessary for your survival in the higher difficulty levels and finding them is as much fun as shooting the enemies that sometimes spawn when you open them. Though it took me several runs through a level until I found most of the secrets, it felt good returning to that classic style of FPS play where shooting rockets at cracks in walls or looking for ways to exploit the architecture in order to jump over seemingly impassable fences was considered "normal".
The core shooting is centered around two transforming weapons, one ballistic and one energy based. These two weapons are unique in that they have the ability to change from one type of weapon to another on the fly. For example, the CLN kinetic weapon can be both a heavy assault rifle or shotgun depending on upgrades and the NRG energy weapon can be used as a regular plasma rifle or a high-powered railgun. These are just a couple of different functions that either gun can be upgraded to and the best part is there is no need to reload. Just find ammo pickups and blast away... at everything! The environment will be one of your best allies as you fight savage robots, and using your surroundings will make crowd control a lot easier. That's basically all you need to know as far as strategy goes. Basically, just blast the sh** out of everything you see.
But combat can still be frustrating. And old-school difficult. This game requires circle strafing, a skill most people either too young to have developed or haven't had a chance to exercise recently, so most firefights will happen in close range, running inches from your opponents
The robots in Hard Reset are actually pretty aggressive, and there's definitely no shortage of targets. You will face hordes of these mechanical foes as you progress through the game's story.The models you'll get are a handful of robot variations; from clusters of small, mouser types to gorilla framed chargers to skeletons grafted onto mechs shooting rockets that escaped from Final Doom. But that's one of its biggest downfalls. With such straightforward gameplay, only having half a dozen normal enemies makes for excessive repetition. But that's not quite right because every one of those regular enemies has a texture swapped revision with slightly different behaviors and armaments.
Even the boss battles, of which there are only a few, don't offer much. The models are large and uniquely designed, their encounters amount to being trapped in an arena fighting swarms of normals until the boss exposes their glowing orange weak spots.
Exploration used to be a hallmark of FPS- a chance for the player to find hidden caches of ammo and armor to heal from the last battle and prep for the next- but became unnecessary as Halo introduced regenerating shields and did away with those kinds of pickups. In Hard Reset, containers of Nano are hidden throughout the world and offer an incentive to explore. Destructible walls, platforming puzzles, alternate paths- they all offer opportunities to further develop equipment that would merely be collectible items in the form of dog tags and hidden packages in other games. It's a direct, in-game reward rather than empty content for the completionist. Its a nice return to form from genre defining games Doom and Marathon.
The biggest disappointment with Hard Reset has to be the short campaign mode. With a single player mode that took me only six hours to complete it isn't unfair to say the length of the game is an issue. If Hard Reset had a co-op mode of some sort I could see stretching the play time out and enjoying a second or third trip with a friend but at only six hours long you'll have to rely on the game's leaderboards and scoring system to juice any remaining excitement out of it. Though the harder levels are fun to challenge once you've managed to get the gameplay down and the "EX Mode" that lets you replay it with your already purchased weapon upgrades is fun to toy around with, it does manage to drag a bit at times.
Yet another small blemish on the game is the lack of boss fights. While the two "true" boss fights that _do_ exist in the game are phenomenally well done they only serve to make their rarity feel that much more painful. I know such heavily detailed and well-scripted boss fights require extra testing and that testing takes more money, but effort should have been made to put a couple more bosses into the game before they had shipped it. A small gripe to be sure, but a gripe nonetheless.
While not perfect, Hard Reset can be a chance for Flying Wild Hog to further streamline many of the more tried-and-true mechanics that had made up the FPS genre for so many years.