It’s the indie FPS with the AAA attitude. HARD RESET impressed us a lot when we saw it pre-release, but can it keep up the momentum across a full game? The answer is… sort of.
Hard Reset embraces the old rules of the first-person shooter. Health pick-ups are strewn across each level as brightly illuminated neon green med-packs. Ammo and secret pick-ups glow red and orange respectively. Enemies attack en-masse, and you point your gun and let rip.
It’s refreshing, after years of added complexity, to return to this combat style. There’s no chest-high cover, iron-sight aiming or even reloading. It’s arcade spraying-from-the hip and strafing. It’s gloriously free-flowing and frantic.
And yet, quickly, the problems start to arrive. AI follows a strict set of behaviour that makes each battle routine after the first few encounters with an enemy type. The small robotic foes swam and the larger foes charge, spray bullets or rockets or get in close to hack at you. And it’s often fiercely, brutally challenging. In fact, the very first enemy you meet – a lone foot-tall robot with a circular saw – can tear you apart if given the chance. Sometimes, Hard Reset’s combat gets the adrenaline pumping. Other times, it’s just plain frustrating.
There’s no save-anywhere feature, and checkpoints are sparse. It’s baffling why a PC game of this ilk would lack a quicksave feature. Often, battles will unravel in stages against different waves of enemies, and the ability to save between them would have transformed combat for the better.
Working hard, or hardly working?
Outside of combat, Hard Reset sees you traipse across an utterly gorgeous cyberpunk city, dripping with character and atmosphere, in search of power switches, keycards and the next big fight. It follows a paper-thin story so close to that of the Matrix films that it may as well be an unofficial spinoff.
It’s a shame, because sometimes – just sometimes – it looks like it’s going to get smart. The machines and humanity are at war, with the humans producing a quantum matrix to store their consciousnesses while the machines want to try to surpass a theoretical limit to their intelligence. It hints at the fundamental question of what it is to be human and sentient. But it plays with the narrative order in a confusing manner, and badly-weaved exposition between levels fails to set the scene. When it all winds up, too many questions are left unanswered. It’s a real shame, as the spark of a great story gently simmers underneath. It’s as if the writers just couldn’t quite find it.
An even bigger problem, though, is that it’s remarkably badly paced. For a six-hour game, this is shocking. The repetition of the combat certainly doesn’t help with this, and the level design trips itself up slightly by blatantly showcasing the large, multi-wave battles with liberal placement of explosive objects.
But then there’s the destructible scenery. As enemies charge towards you, they’ll smash trough pillars and city signs as well as barging other obstacles out of the way. It’s incredibly ominous watching a charging robot fast approaching, powerfully tearing through anything and everything in its path. It’s a huge part of Hard Reset’s charm, in fact. Despite the clear flaws in almost every aspect of the game, it’s easy to forget them and focus on the spectacle.
Explosive objects not only explode in beautifully bright flames, but make a huge difference in turning the tide of battle. So too do the electrical sources, which spit out streams of electricity to fry nearby foes.
Hard-hitting
Weapons are massively satisfying to use. You only really have two: an energy weapon and a machine gun. However, as you progress, you gain experience points which allow you to upgrade combat gear and these base armaments. Weapon upgrades allow the energy gun to fire different properties of energy, from standard bolts to exploding balls. And as for your machine gun, it twists like a Rubik’s Transformer into different weapon types, such as a shotgun and rocket launcher. They sound and feel powerful, tearing off shards of metal from foes and the occasional limb.
Hard Reset continues to trade on nostalgia with the design of enemies. The majority of your robotic foes strongly resemble the Strogg from the Quake series with their melding of flesh and machine. The Quake games are ones you’ll probably end up thinking of a lot, in fact.
It’s a mix of good and bad, then – but despite its inescapable flaws, I came away from Hard Reset with a positive impression overall. It’s a shame it’s singleplayer-only, incidentally: at the end of such an insubstantial campaign, I was eager to pit the scenery and weapons against other human players. Never mind. It hits that nostalgia nerve. It’s a solid shooter.
This is a gorgeous, exhilarating old-school shooter, full of great ideas. But it’s also insubstantial, confusing and frequently frustrating. A decent effort and a lot of fun… but it could have been something special.
Hard Reset, from Flying Wild Hog, is out now for PC via Steam.
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