Hard Reset

In the days where FPS are mainly dominated by the heavily story driven and "cutscenized" with whack a mole gameplay, this game comes with more traditional routes of avoiding enemies by strafing and sprinting while dropping every single power you get from your weapons.

Gameplay

The game plays very similarly as games such as serious sam or painkiller, but there is a lot of environmental elements that can be used against your enemies, with a lot of varied explosive / electric emitters that can be shot to help us killing our enemies. They are made easy to spot in order to increase first time use blue for electric hazard and red for explosive hazard. most of the areas in the default pat of the game are filled with a lot of these pieces while the extended section have a lot less of these. I think we should had a kick or a punch just to be able to throw those things towards our enemies. The game interactivity is quite low in general, aside of the destructive elements who are highly present in most of the levels and the doom 3 like interactive panels with very few valves here and there to shut down. The weapons are fairly standard in general aside of their nifty ability to transform they are quite weapons you can find in any other shooter. although there is quite some interesting originalities like the electric blaster and mortar as the electric blaster behaves like an electric shotgun while the electric mortar behaves like a sticky mine that emits electricity, if it sticks on a large enemy it causes good damage to everything nearby it. In general it's quite standard I mean the CLN doesn't have many interesting modules aside of the mighty rocket launcher, once obtained I upgraded it and it filled a lot of situations with its also nifty laser module that we can use to guide the rocket the way we want. The particular thing with it is that the rocket doesn't explode at close range until a certain time, the game doesn't feature any sort of rocket jump for us, but considering the movement in general it's quite slow for a fast paced shooter. The other weapon NRG despite not having clear transformations does have the most interesting setup. we have a railgun that shoot through walls, a smart gun who is essentially a sort of swarm missile launcher with rockets that can go through walls, the electric weapons (the alt for the electric weapons are also good as using EMP or stasis field allow us to block enemies with other enemies and cause a lot of damage to these evil robots. One thins that I didn't liked much aside of the slow movement was also the quite confined arenas with very low space to maneuver and with very tough enemies in it reminded me chasm the rift in a bad way as in this game you had often to back pedal and prey for not taking damage, or use slowing down weapons or surrounding objects even if we end up being heavily damaged. The game is also quite easy when you restart the first levels while having most of the upgrades, mostly some weapons like the rocket launcher as they are very efficient in comparison of the others that we unlock early as those weapons are quite required bevore having access to the second tier of weapon which are for the most part the most powerful and / or practical (the railgun as a practical weapon for example) and the rocket launcher as the powerful weapon. While the feeling of the weapons are quite good, they quite lack of power against those torso robots that charge at you like bulls. these robots are way too resistant and even if I feel that there is some location based damage as shooting them in the hand make them quite losing it and walk only with the other hand, it's quite like if the said robot has been shot practically close to death with a lot of power which makes the feature close to a gimmick. I would have preferred them to have weaker limbs instead as it would have made the feature a lot more useful and made the claustrophobic design of certain places something of interest than being just a place that is simply hard to get past because there is a lack of space to maneuver. I also think that the weapons could have been more original than what they currently are and even having a third weapon wich is entierely based on chemicals which would have added some flavor to the gameplay as well as doing some over time damage to the enemies. I mean the CLN could have something like nails or even shurikens as projectiles, the NRG shooting lasers and potentially cut the enemies limbs and overheating certain parts to make them explode. I mean the transforming weapons were just there to fulfill a somewhat realistic purpose of having two guns while the entire rest is unrealistic .... I also find that the tranformations are quite uninspired as most of the weapon modes look the same next to an other, I mean the Mine, grenade mode and rifle are practically the same we can only distinguish the shotgun because it has two barrels and the rocket who have top tube. the NRG is far worse as most of the modes inly involve the rotation of the arm little changes on the sphere and the barrel. When I take games like codename outbreak or even redline their weapons have more easily recognizable modes not that they are perfect, but they show more of a difference between modes that what hard reset weapons does display. Aside of these minor gripes the game is quite enjoyable even if it's not playable all at once. after dying a countless amount of times under certain hard unfair situations it's quite good to do something else and restart a game later.

Graphics and miscalaneous

The game uses a proprietary engine and personally it's a very good engine with good general performance. It doesn't eat too much resources in order to show pretty graphics although certain parameters does eat a lot of resources and are quite good to lower if you have a not that great computer. The sounds are good in general I don't have any gripe in that area, the weapons sound powerful even when they aren't that powerful. The sounds of the transformations are good, the enemies have in general fitting sounds even if I think they could have a bit more variety of sounds. The AI is pretty basic as most enemies try to run at you and only later enemies shoots projectiles. the music is nice even if I don't find the tracks memorable like Unreal for example. the theme is good and the art of the levels very good in general, I do like the cyberpunk with bits of diesel punk here and there. The fact that the game pretty much only involves robots seems perfectly fitting for younger audiences to play it as there isn't any kind of blood aside of a single flying corpse at the beginning ... The retail game does have a proprietary DRM, but it's quite light, just some internet check up. You can put the game on steam but personally there is no interest in doing so it's very much on your liking.

Conclusion

Hard Reset extended is quite a nice shooter, but it's not a great shooter, so if you want a great arena shooter, I'd say go for Painkiller, Necrovision or even the latest Shadow Warrior, but as it is if you have the game for around 10$ then take it as it's worth 8h of entertainment, but don't buy it for more than 20$ as even if you won't feel completely ripped off you will feel that the game doesn't have much replayability as the level are quite very linear, and even the secrets aside of having some NANO aren't as interesting and important in later replays than a game like Duke Nukem or doom where the ammunition will refill one weapon with rare pickups of ammo or even items and power ups that can't be found anywhere on the level in great quantity as the pickups are essentially health, nano, and ammo for one or both weapons which quite limits the management of the ammunition as a strategic element. The game is a nice piece of entertainment and I don't regret to have bought it as considering the new shadow warrior, they show some promising potential for future games. But hard reset is a good game, but not an indispensable one. I wanted to give it a 3.5 stars but I ended up with 3 as because It's far to be a great game. It's just some nice piece of relatively solid and challenging entertainment that tried to be an oldschool shooter at some point. It pretty much made it. But really it's a basic shooter that deserves at least two playthroughs as I did, but while in certain games I would play on hard this one isn't pleasant in hard as it means more of unfair difficulty. I'd rather play Quake on nightmare for example which is quite unbeatable but feels better in therms of challenge than Hard Reset.

In other words if you lack of arena shooters try this one you may find a good snack here but don't expect too much or any kind of revolution.