Additions make it feel more like a real game, but not a good one.
I already had the original Hard Reset, but this "remaster" was 80 cents on Steam despite being almost brand new. The graphics aren't really improved, although the game still looks great despite being about five years old. Instead, Hard Reset Redux is both an excuse to release the game on PS4 and as a way to fix the very flawed original. It almost works.
In Redux the difficulty and enemy placement is reworked, which is a good thing since the original was often very poor in this respect. I seem to recall having to play Hard Reset on Easy, and this time Normal was fine, if not a little too easy. There's a new enemy type (it's a cyborg zombie). There's a new weapon, which is blatantly the sword from Shadow Warrior given a cyberpunk-y coat of paint. You don't get any of the special command moves from Shadow Warrior, and Hard Reset's enemies eat you alive at melee range, so it's effectively useless.
Instead, the most integral addition to this remaster is a quick-dodge move. Anybody who has played the original Hard Reset will probably remember how impossible it was to dodge any single attack, even heavily telegraphed bull-charges from the heavier robots. The quick-dodge adds a huge amount of much-needed viability to the game that was absent in the 2012 release. Note that I did not say it 'fixes' the game, I said it makes the game viable as a piece of first person shooter entertainment, whereas before it mostly was not. The quick dodge is not linked to any sort of cooldown or stamina meters. If you play Hard Reset Redux you will probably be mashing the dodge button like a Castlevania speedrunner, and it feels good to do so.
Other than this short list, the game still has the same old problems. Like in the original you always have two guns (and a useless sword) with up to five weapon modes apiece. For example, you press Q to ready your Red Gun and then press the number keys to select Assault Rifle mode, Shotgun mode, or Rocket mode. The other weapon, on E, has things like a plasma rifle, an electric mortar, and a rail gun. Unofrtunately, if you want to switch from the rocket to the rail gun it might requires you to press two buttons and watch two different animations and probably accidentally select the wrong thing all the time. This system is just not conducive to the style of fast action Hard Reset is going for. It also doesn't help that most of the weapon modes are not very fun to use and very few of the enemy types are fun to fight. The two guns do little to differentiate themselves from one another-- you'd expect that one would be slow but powerful and the other one fast but weak or for each one to be tuned for different ranged or situations, or for damage versus area of effect, or something. Instead it just seems arbitrary. Having only two weapons means you will never, ever run out of ammo.
Hard Reset was a bad game. Now it's just a fairly mediocre one. That's a pretty significant improvement, to be honest, but probably not enough for most people.
