Groundhog Day... errr... revisited.
Meaning that -at whatever grade of difficulty you play- you can be sure to be forced to restart every level in the game at least twice and a lot of the time more than that.
Hard Reset is one of those games of which the developers thought it to be fun to let you start over a level as many times as possible, probably because otherwise the game would be over in no time.
This being said, getting killed at almost every level -because of being swamped from literally every direction by all kinds of charging mecs and bots- is about the only (and weighty) negative of the game.
The story is okay, albeit just a -thin- excuse for letting you blast your surroundings to smithereens. The latter is of course the basis for a barrel of fun, in that you can -besides the robots- shoot quite a lot of stuff to bits. And with bits, I mean bits. Shoot at an exterior airco and the thing bursts into an electric fire with sparks dancing across the street while you have to duck for parts of the fan flying by.
The surrounding electronics can also be used as remote hazards when being attacked: a robot standing in the vicinity of an advertising boot will get electrocuted when said boot is shot at, giving you a hand in cleaning the streets of walking toasters.
To be honest, I had quite a bit of fun. That is, in-between instant death when walking into a subway toilet or underground car park when -wham!- the door closes behind you, the lights go out and tiny bots literally drop from the ceiling and pour out of the walls and you can't see where you go and it's bye-bye Kansas.
Which means you're back to square one. Or, at least back to the start of the last level. Which brings me back to the start and my initial grievances about the annoying fact you keep on dying and are constantly forced to restart a certain level. Isn't such a disturbance at the beginning, but the further you go -and the more you die- the more frustrating it gets. Right to the point where it becomes a real pain in the neck.
So, my feelings are ambivalent.
Is this a fun game? Sure. Like I said, in-between deaths it's great.
Surroundings are nice too -they remind me a lot of the set pieces of Blade Runner (the movie). And there's lots of stuff to shoot with a wide variety of weapons -the latter you have to earn, along with upgrades, by "finding" orange colored tool-boxes which give you NANO points you can spend at certain upgrade automatons sprinkled all over the place.
Conclusion: silly story, but a good excuse for going berserk with ray-guns; while at the same time the game quickly becomes a frustration-fest which also can make you go berserk at your screen.
Gotta go. Must re-start the last level. Also gotta remember they came from the left, this time...
JJ