Hard Reset

More of a soft reboot if you ask me.

Hard reset was released September 13^th of last year as a PC exclusive title, and it's available on Steam for $20.

I like first person shooters. Not the silly new ones like Call of Duty, which I can rage at for decades and decades, but the old ones, like Painkiller, Doom, Quake, Serious Sam, and the Duke Nukem games that didn't take 15 years to make. They all had something a lot of games nowadays tend to forget. They all knew they were video games. Sure, some of them had plot and sure, sometimes they were good, but usually the games were just about pure entertainment, something about yelling “OSCAR WILCO FOXTROT CHARLIE” and spinning around rapid firing a sniper rifle just doesn't give me. So I was interested in Hard Reset. I bought the game on sale on steam for something like $5, and left it in my list of games for a couple months. When I got around to installing it, it was about 3 gigabytes, so it took an hour or so, with my connection. When I got it installed, I booted it up, and was immediately hit with how nice the game looked. Of course, it was a bit too nice for my computer, so I changed the screen resolution to 4:3 and changed the rest of the settings to the lowest possible—I like my games to run fast, so that I can perform actions quickly and cohesively. The first few levels of the game were quite fun, showing a very blade runner-esque futuristic city, complete with blue lights and towering Grey buildings. Combat was fun, upgrading weapons to shoot robots in new, creative ways. And for a bit, there was a plot, displayed in beautifully rendered and displayed motion comics, which actually seemed to integrate the English language, unlike many other indie games.

However, about an hour in, after the first memorable boss, I realized something. I'd played the game for an hour, and never left the blue-grey color scheme the entire time. Sure, I’d briefly been underground in some basement structure, but I'd almost immediately been thrown BACK upstairs onto the regular 'future city'. I'd been fighting the same 5 monsters with various palette swaps the entire time, and while Atlas was a fun boss, I'd later find out that he was the first of two bosses. Yup. Two bosses. And Atlas was a little after the halfway point. Furthermore, the further into the game I played, the worse the cutscenes got, and the less cohesive the plot got. Framerate began to slow because the game had basically padded out each encounter with more and more explosive objects, from 'anti theft' shocking vending machines, to red explosive...things. Basically, I'd shoot at the first enemy in a stream of 5 or 6, and it'd set off a chain reaction. Or, I'd whip out the shotgun, and obliterate all in front of me. I didn't even really need the other weapons, and the Plasma rifle was largely useless until I got the railgun...which I only used in the final boss fight. All in all, the game was something like 4 to 5 hours long.

Which was incredibly disappointing. And the whole time, I really just fought the same 3 palette swapped enemies. The big bulky thing which ran at you, the little guys that sometimes exploded, and the medium sized things that sometimes had guns but usually just ran at you. And next to nothing was explained about the robots or the world that the game takes place in. Both topics which I found extremely interesting. The hero allegedly defends the digitalized souls of a billion people—which is incredibly awesome. But next to nothing is ever said about this. Little is explained about anything, especially later on when the grammar gets bad and the acting gets worse. Apparently the corporation that runs the city isn't good but isn't evil at the same time...? Well...That's an interesting topic to never pursue! The game ends when you shoot some giant bug creature thing with the railgun, which is only useful here because it's basically a sniper rifle. Sniper rifles weren't in Painkiller, Duke Nukem, Doom (except for the later ones), Quake (again save for the later ones), but they were in Serious Sam. Why? Because some enemies were actually far away! You're rarely, if ever presented with an enemy that isn't running directly at your face, and the weapons that aren't the base machine guns and the shotgun are really just boss battle equipment.

In summary, Hard Reset was quite promising, but it never really achieved what it wanted to do. It's only a throwback to old, early 90's strafe and shoot games in the sense that the plot is virtually nonexistant, but that's just about it. It looks nice, for it's time, but I figure the graphics are sloppy graphics—slightly unlike Crysis 1 and completely unlike Half Life 2, which I can play without problem on medium to high. The strafing barely works as the only thing you can strafe from is the thing that runs at you, but it just follows your strafe anyway. And by the time you've strafed to the slightest, you've probably shot something explosive and are taking damage at an uncanny range from both the charger-thing and the explosion. There are 2 bosses, two and half if you want to be completely precise, because there's a turret that has a fair bit of health about midway through the game, and there's no multiplayer aspect. There's achievements, sure, and there are a few secrets and such, but it doesn't really have any replay value. Doom had replay value because there were rooms and segments to explore that actually gave you rewards. You might find a shotgun.2 or a chainsaw, something cool, while in this case you'll find 200 credits which can be slightly tagged onto your quest to buy the weapons in the game. Which wasn't really a problem. Most of the secrets can be found by turning around, and I had every weapon by the end, with most fully upgraded.

If you really are interested in this game though, there are worse things than giving the people who made Painkiller and worked on The Witcher 2 twenty dollars. Sure, it's incredibly overpriced and really not that much fun later on, but it can be a fun ride for a bit of time, and you're giving money to indie developers. Maybe they'll make a new Painkiller, or maybe they'll have accumulated enough money to buy id software and get them to make a new game that doesn't suck.

In my book, Hard Reset gets 4/10 stars—slightly below average. Granted, the standards for Average and Good have much decreased over the years, but I wouldn't buy the game. It's more worth the $5 I paid for it when it was on sale, not the $20 it's worth now.