Hard Reset

I am not sure where I first heard about Hard Reset, but I immediately tried the demo, and decided it was a game to keep an eye out for. Eventually it rolled around on sale, and I snatched it up right away, which was good, because I was looking for a new shooter to get into, and Hard Reset most certainly satisfied that itch.

Hard Reset is a fast paced shooter wherein you take on a veritable horde of killer robots, which range in size and variety from small ones with various means of dismembering your body, to large "gorillas" that seem to be in a competition to see which one can punt you the furthest. It is not an endless slaughterfest, and there are a few puzzles in the game, which largely take the form of requiring your to open up doors or passage ways to progress, though in reality those are brief respites between the larger waves of enemies you'll encounter.

These guys + tight spaces = death.

The weapons in the game are a little funny. Rather than having a wide variety of firearms to choose from, you have two - an impact round gun, which is to say it shoots bullets, and an electrical type weapon. However, as you kill enemies or explore levels, you'll gather points that you can use to purchase upgrades at the correct booths. Many of these upgrades are for your weapons, though there are some for your character as well. Those focused on weapons offer different modes of action, such as taking your traditional gun, which functions as a machine gun, and giving you the ability to use it as a shotgun or RPG. Similarly, the electricity gun can also function as a mortar, railgun, or smartgun that fires a homing projectile that can go through walls. All in all, you can use upgrades to turn your two base weapons into a total of 10, each with it's own secondary function and a bonus modifier that does things like increase the effective radius of your mortar weapon, which is one of my favorites because the secondary function on that weapon temporarily freezes enemies within it. The one downside is that each weapon still requires the same ammo as it's respective base, so it doesn't matter if you're using it as an assault rifle or shotgun, when it hits 0, you're out either way.

Just as critical as your weapons, are upgrades to your character, which cover things like unlocking, and then upgrading, a HUD, or changing the amount of damage you take. Others increase the health or ammo you gain when you find resupply packs. Just as with your weapons, some of the upgrades require others to unlock, so to get, say, the RPG, you'll find you need to first unlock the shotgun. The end result is that you'll need to find plenty of upgrade points to get the items you're looking for, and I'm not actually sure if you can get everything, considering that I only managed to acquire a handful of upgrades myself. Who knows, maybe I'm just bad about exploring and did not find all those secret nooks where the useful stuff is hidden.

There are, in a way, far too many upgrades for my taste. Great options, but I fail at finding enough upgrade points to get them all.

I do normally like to talk about the story involved in a game, since it is an important aspect of many games. With Hard Reset however, I am really at a loss for words. There's all this talk of A.I.s: internal AI vs. external AIs, and important AI matrices. Other seemingly important story points include someone letting in killer robots into this safe area, a disease, and the ability to absorb people's minds. Really, I had no idea what was going on here, and I'm generally a hard one to trip up, at least when compared to those I know (I'm still baffled people don't understand Inception, which I've been told is "hard"). The conclusion I finally came to about the story was this: "what the heck do I care, I get to shoot homicidal robots!"

Unfortunately, those homicidal robots shoot back.

Instead, the drive to beat this games comes from how challenging it is, and it is challenging, even on the lower difficulties. This comes from a variety of sources, such as the surprising number of little enemies, which are all very fast, those huge enemies which are also very fast and much more powerful, the damage that everything deals, the accuracy of those that have turrets or some other form of gun, and so on. Moral of the story is you take a lot of damage, and very quickly, if you aren't careful. Sometimes that's as easy as avoiding explosive barrels that will most likely cause your doom when they invariably explode due to enemy fire. At other points, you just have to be aware of enemies that appear under boxes, or fall from crates, and essentially never let you guard down.

The level of difficulty in this game is further amplified by the checkpoint save system, something for which the game was heavily criticized upon release, and which was eventually altered to add many more checkpoints throughout the game. I can not speak to what the game was originally like, but there were a few times I found myself frustrated by the system, since I would seem to die on the last wave of a particularly tough area, and thus be forced to replay the last few minutes, all of which were challenging. However, rather than just complain about the fact, I viewed it as yet another challenge that had to be overcome, essentially limiting the margin of error you can experience before failing, rather than if the game had a quicksave system, letting you save immediately between waves, and thus requiring you to only perform well in bursts, rather than over a sustained period. In short, this game is challenging, and it does not coddle you like so many recent games (I'm looking at you Infinity Ward), since you actually have to be pretty good to make progress. And that...is a good thing.

For the competition oriented, there is even a score given out at the end of each level.

 Altogether Hard Reset its a very good game. I applaud the challenge presented within it, though when I look at my score, it is atrocious. The weapons were fun, particularly those on the electrical gun that can see through walls, such as the rail gun when zoomed in or the smart gun all the time, and the variety made it possible to develop various strategies for dealing with the different types of enemies. One I found myself using often was, when fighting the large gorillas, to pull out my mortar gun, and fire one time stopping shot, followed by one regular shot that would spit out electricity from the point it landed at for a few seconds. I would follow that up by quick swapping to the bullet powered gun, and pull out a grenade launcher. A few direct hits can make a world of difference when you're trying to dodge an incredibly fast enemy that likes to charge at you in a tight tunnel environment.

The art style was beautiful, even when I was trying to blow everything up and turn the environment itself into a tool against my enemies even though it was more often used against me, and the deserted cityscape, all scifi of course, was a bit eerie, though given enough time, I found myself longing for something different. I also can't help but feel I'm missing something major in the story, and that is a bit depressing. Still, Hard Reset makes for a good way to spend a couple of hours on the base game, 5 in my case, especially if you can find it under the $10 mark, since there is now a free DLC that adds in a few extra levels. That's good, because this game is surprisingly short, containing only 7 levels. If you're looking for something a bit different than the AAA shooters we've been getting lately, pick up Hard Reset soon, because while you'll be frustrated, you won't be disappointed - 8 out of 10.

So, the final breakdown:

Score: 8/10

Suggested Price: $10