Bland Adventure
I wanted to enjoy Hard Reset. Being in the same vain as Serious Sam, it repeated arena combat scenarios for you to run through. The problem lies in the fact that this game doesn't nearly have enough charm that the Serious Sam games have. At first the game was fine for sure, but eventually the game became tedious and I was actually looking forward to finally finishing the game so I could move onto something better. Find out below to see what I disliked about Hard Reset and what I was hoping it would be that it never amounted to.
The story is straightforward and that's not necessarily a good thing. Future settings in games always leave room for some pretty neat storytelling and gameplay opportunities but this game doesn't capitalize on either of them. Your character for example seems to be cybernetically enhanced but he has no special skills to speak of. I think it's a missed chance at some neat character customization. Your character does have the ability to sprint but the meter is so tiny that 90% of the time it's a fairly useless option in combat. Who would have thought a character created for combat has the lung capacity of a deflated balloon? I was frustrated during multiple combat encounters when I was killed because my opponents were far too quick for me to dodge and it led to too many deaths.
Speaking of combat, this entire game is focused on arena style moments. Long rooms, square rooms, and large open areas offer you the chance to fight the same enemies over and over again. Like I stated above, your character doesn't have any gifts that make him a standout during combat so situations where you're forced to fight in smaller rooms lead to a lot of unfortunate deaths because you can't effectively dodge since the enemies are too numerous and quick for you to evade them. If your character's skill set was on par with the enemies, combat wouldn't have become such a chore and I don't think I would have become as burned out. When you're in a large open area the combat is surprisingly fine for the most part, even though a limited lack of combat options led me to choosing one tactic: upgrade my gun to have gravity grenades, which pulled enemies in and then block them up with my grenade launcher.
The best part about Hard Reset is the weapons you have. The game doesn't throw tons of different weapons at you that become lost in the clutter of options that become the go-to choices for dispatching your foes. You get an assault rifle and a plasma rifle. Seems fairly boring I know, but the developers did something neat by allowing you pick and choose attachments, effectively giving you modular options for your guns. From grenade launchers to plasma mortars, your 2 weapons become different killing options by simply clicking an option on the number pad. I think it was a neat way to clean up the messiness that some FPS games, and especially ones like Serious Sam have a problem with by presenting the player with too many options.
Hard Reset wasn't fun and I can't find much evidence to offer a recommendation for this title. If you can pick it up cheap, go ahead and give it a test try but I wouldn't definitely advise against giving this game a shot at full price since you will surely be disappointed by the bland level design, and standard gameplay that doesn't offer anything cool. There is a remake of this out on the Steam store and I plan on giving it a try at some point, so let's hope that that version of the game is better.
