Hard Reset Review
This review is for the original version, the story of which was subsequently repeated in the first re-release.
As I watched the credits roll I felt equal parts rage and satisfaction: which is to say not a great deal of both. You see it was rather unexpected. I’d just killed a gigantic, lumbering spider of a robot and the story had just started to hit its strides—it had almost even become interesting!—and I was looking forward to finding out what ungodly number of enemies I would be confronted with next. Instead of enemies I got text. It seemed as if I had only been playing for a few hours. Of course in reality I had been playing for six and a half hours which is a testament to how much I was enjoying myself, and while six and a half hours is a perfectly reasonable length for a very reasonably priced first person shooter I still felt a little empty.
Me as the credits rolled.
You see Hard Reset isn’t like other first person shooters. There’s no regenerating health (though armour and ammo regenerates), no quick saves, no mid-level cutscenes, and all corridors lead to things other than corridors. Hell, there aren’t even any people to shoot! In fact you’ll be concentrating all your firepower on robots which give Flying Wild Hog the freedom to actually design enemies that are composed and behave very differently to each other.
There are small, quick enemies that have one thing on their mind: getting close enough to you to tear you to shreds. Some of them are blessed with the ability to explode. Let them get too close and you’ll have a face full of shrapnel, but you can also use them to your advantage because if an explosion can hurt you it can hurt the other enemies. There are big, lumbering robots whose sole objective is to get up close and personal through bum rushing which may come as a surprise when you first see them due to their hulking gait.
Then there are more traditional enemies that actually shoot at you, or bombard you with a carpet bombing of mortars. It may seem pointless to go through a list of enemies without context so here it is: the only time you will be fighting any one type of enemies alone is when you are at a great environmental disadvantage, or when there’s a small private army of them attacking you. But the best moments are when you fight them together: they form a symphony of murderous intent.
Pictured: Exploding bullet. Not pictured: Exploding robot.
You’ll find yourself dodging mortar shells, bullets and keeping at bay the smaller enemies that are rushing at you, while also dodging and slowly taking down the larger enemies trying to charge into you. It might sound like chaos, but it gets even worse. Fearing a robot apocalypse the good people of Bezoar have seen fit to store explosives everywhere, and just to be certain made sure that almost all electronics when damaged become a dangerous conduit, zapping anything that comes to close to them. Oh, and many of the enemies explode a bit when they die too. That better?
But apart from doling out a little extra damage when you’re in a tight place the environment functions on another level; drastically changing how you must approach taking down enemies. While you might get on fine with taking on several of the larger enemies, while also fending off a small armada of smaller ones, it can be a completely different story when you find yourself in a small compact room against just one of them.
Suddenly strafing and jumping out of the ways of their charging attacks isn’t so easy! You have to consider the environment carefully. The placement and timing of when the enemies make their appearance is scripted, but instead of being a hindrance to the freedom of your play it means that the majority of the fire fights are very tightly designed for maximum challenge, and most importantly, the unexpected joys and bits of spontaneity are not through random chance caused by the AI or random spawning, but your own actions.
You might accidentally blow up a barrel in an explosive shot aimed at an enemy, and that might set off a huge chain reaction of explosions taking a large bite out of the enemy’s forces. It’s much more satisfying than if the AI is having all the fun!
Walls are just as likely to explode as bullets and enemies. The (exploding) walls have secrets. No ears, though.
Of course most of the time you’ll be too busy staying alive to take in the beauty, and spontaneity of the destruction: Hard Reset is aptly named. It’s hard, and you’ll find yourself often back at the last checkpoint. As I said there is no quick save option, and the game is all the better for it. There is generally a checkpoint in between each battle so that if you die you only need to be thinking about how to approach the battle you are up to, but it does add a little extra intensity because you do have to start the battle all over again, and the battles can last for a long time.
And there are a lot of them. In between battles you have a chance to catch your breath, perhaps looking for secrets or health and ammo or ponder your next upgrade, and often you will be teased by a small enemy swiftly running in the direction that you’re headed: probably catching up with its mates and telling them you’re coming. It works wonderfully in building the tension: it’s terrifying to imagine what is lying around the corner, but it’s equally as exciting to imagine how you’re going to kill it.
What sort of secrets might you be looking for? N.a.no. You see there are only two weapons in the game. One a Gatling gun, the other a glowy, energy weapon of the futurist blue variety. But both weapons can be upgraded, effectively making them several weapons in one. The Gatling gun can become a shotgun, and the energy weapon can become a mortar (a necessity when taking on the pesky, small robots) or a homing missile launcher that can shoot through walls, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Yeah, the energy weapon is definitely a lot cooler than the Gatling gun, and that’s saying something because it’s a Gatling gun for Christ’s sake! You can also upgrade your own abilities, increasing your health or the longevity of the shield. It gives Hard Reset a slight RPG feel, and it’s a joy to unlock a new upgrade to the weapons, but there’s only so much N.a.n.o. to go around so you won’t be experiencing every weapon on your first play-through, but that’s where EX Mode comes in where you can play-through the game again with your upgrades from your last play-through.
Another great advantage of the lack of regenerating health is that it gives the battles yet another elemental element: you’ve got to memorise where the health packs are. There’s nothing more satisfying than being close to death’s door only to sprint to the nearest health pack before clearing the rest of the room. Plus it’s a little more badarse than running behind cover and cowering while your health recovers.
This is what the story looks like. And yes, you are meant to thank me for not pressing the any key before the comicscene ended.
While the story itself is not particularly interesting, and the script is funny for all the wrong reasons, (prepare yourself for unnecessary swearing and the awkward voice acting that accompanies a script of that nature) it knows its limitations and has the courtesy to tell itself in whispers. It’s presented in semi-animated comic book cutscenes that play while the next level loads, and as soon as the level has loaded you can start the level straight away whether the cutscene has finished or not.
Yet at the same time the atmosphere is excellent. There are posters and graffiti everywhere, some of the convenient electricity dispensers are in fact advertising products, and do so very humorously, flattering and begging the player to buy whatever they are selling, then complaining when you ignore their pleas. It doesn’t hurt that the graphics look so damn good, though it certainly wears its Doom and Quake influences on its sleeve with most of the enemies nearly cherry picked from both games. Enemies slowly degrade so to speak as you kill them, with bits of machinery flying off them, and naturally after they’re dead you can degrade their bodies a little further if you like. Of course this is much more fun when they’re half man, half machine as it’s far more visceral to remove head from body, than metal from metal.
Not all robots are evil, though some of them do suck.
The smaller enemies trip and stumble if you shoot their legs, so there’s always a wonderful amount of feedback: you know when you’re hurting something, though at first some of the boss battles may be a little confusing. Just remember one thing: if it glows, we can kill it.
“Wait—what? Boss battles?” You heard me right, and while there are only a few of them they are genuine highlights. Not only are the bosses huge, they’re as tough as they are big, and they’ve got just as big an army of friends. You’ve got to take them down glowing piece by piece while fending off their friends, and without the luxury of check points mid-battle: you’re in there for the long haul, and the long haul can be something of a Mad Max road train, especially if you’ve focused on defensive, rather than offensive, upgrades.
It might sound harsh, but that’s half the fun, and it makes your eventual victory all the more satisfying. It also gives the game a little more room to breathe despite its short length. Even on normal by modern FPSer standards the game is a huge challenge, and due to its challenge it’s extremely satisfying, even if the ending isn’t. Know what that means? Time for a replay on Hard, or intense...yes, there’s a difficulty after hard! And while you’re at it you may as well play-through with different upgrade combinations, or grab them all in Ex Mode.
Dat vending machine ass.
There’s no multiplayer, and there shouldn’t be either. The feel of the game: the shooting, the tough hide of the player, the extreme pace and focus on movement all work very well with single player, but might not translate so well to multiplayer. For the almost-budget price a six hour campaign and the extra challenge of harder play-throughs, and different upgrade combinations, it certainly seems like an excellent package. The thing is the slightly abrupt ending has left a sour taste in my mouth; for all the things it did great it never quite reached a genuine climax; as grandiose as the final boss battle was it felt like at the most the end of the first half of the story. The genuine plotline had unveiled, and the basis of the gameplay had been well explored, but just around the corner was something even more special. The credits did not quite suffice.
But even so Hard Reset is exactly what the first person genre needs. Corridor shooters have had their day, neglected single player campaigns that are nothing but a tutorial for multiplayer have worn out their welcome. Hard Reset has helped fill a niche that few other games have dared touch upon in recent times. It’s balls to the walls action, and makes no apologies for being what it is: a challenging, beautiful and very PC (in this case PC meaning quite the opposite to politically correct) experience that due to its brevity perhaps falls just short of something approaching genuine greatness. But it’s one hell of a statement for a developer to release as a first game, and Flying Wild Hog have shown that they may just have a genuine classic in them. Plus releasing a cyberpunk themed first person shooter soon after Deus Ex 2 (there are only two Deus Ex games, okay?) is released? Well, that takes testicles of the bulging kind; testicles filled with talent and delicious, salty gameplay and GPU destroying graphics and explody, physicsy, squishy things.