Hard Reset

Short life span but budget price – this science-fiction inspired first person shooter has a lot to offer with stunning visuals and perfect old-school playability. Pity there's not a multiplayer option. [Nov 2011]

Shooters like Serious Sam and Painkiller are hard to come by these days. Yes, Hard Reset is full of plot holes, the ending is too silly even for a pulp paperback novel, and there is no blood and flesh – only gear-wheels and oil. But even will all of this, Hard Reset is fun enough if you want to just blow off some steam.

If there's one modern shooter convention Hard Reset needs to follow, it's the release of a sequel.

This game hit the time and the spot with its conception unlike the others from the past – making a virtue out of its mediocre and plain form is something we don't see very often these days.

This is a very enjoyable shooter with lots of action, amazing graphics and a wonderfully authentic cyberpunk-atmosphere, but it's somewhat let down by an erratic difficulty and a relatively short campaign.

I am left with the feeling that Hard Reset's title is not a reference to the game's plot or gameplay, but to the videogame industry as a whole. The developers are applying a "reset" to the entire FPS genre, stripping away or outright mocking several modern shooter staples.

It's short and occasionally frustrating, but the fireworks display that is Hard Reset is still a blast.

Overall, this is a game that does exactly what it sets out to do: Be an oldschool manshoot, but with modern elements in the mix that make it more enjoyable, and a suitably bonkers Cyberpunk plot (albeit without any real hacking... ah, well, can't have everything).

Hard Reset isn't a bad game, but it's rote old school sensibility has passed me by. I don't have the same kind of reflexes I did 5 or 10 years ago to properly appreciate the twitch elements, so maybe I have to take some responsibility on that front. For me, Hard Reset is unremarkable because it seems about 5 years too late for me.

This old-school shooter with modern visuals offers intense and fun gunplay, but it's a bit too short and not particularly original. [Nov. 2011, p.83]

Hard Reset is a splendid and beautifully crafted FPS. While its technology rises above many others, its old-school FPS gameplay, while fun and solid, is affected by a scarce variety in the enemies and very short campaign, which is a major flaw because of the absence of a multiplayer mode.

It brings back memories of Painkiller and Serious Sam – again and again you get drowned in enemies. From time to time Hard Reset will beat the hell out of you but it does it in a quite pleasant way and graphics are very nice. The game has two substantial flaws – the single player campaign is short (ca. 6 hours) and there is no multiplayer mode. [October, p.66]

Hard Reset puts you on the streets of a splashy cyberpunk city, atmospherically lying somewhere between the Matrix and Blade Runner, a world of crumbling glass skyscrapers, and unleashes the enemy hoards.

Hard Reset's main strengths lay in its graphics and its consistent delivery of combat which, while moreish and dully enjoyable, lacks the precision or scale of its competition. Thus, while it's a solid game that delivers on a pure blow-stuff-up basis, it doesn't have quite the level of inspiration or finesse needed to make it stand out from the crowd.

Hard Reset is a full-on action-only FPS in a cyberpunk universe, blessed by a beautiful graphical engine and some nice gameplay ideas. The menu, which cycles through corridors, arenas, and waves of enemies, lacks variety, with only two boss fights and an undecipherable scenario, but nice explosions all over and a lot of reloads for the player. It may yet be too subtle for the Painkiller formula lovers... but it still a very ok game.

So amongst the other problems, it's also short and clearly rushed.

For once, I think the experience can be summed up by the main menu. It's very pretty. It also has a transitional animation, in between sub-menus, that lasts four seconds. Want to change your graphical settings, then load an old game? You're going to spend about thirty seconds just watching a transitional animation repeat. Pretty, functional, and then hopelessly irritating for no good reason: that's Hard Reset.

Hard Reset isn't just a reference to what you're expected to do to the killer robots infesting the city, but what the developer tries to do to the shooter design itself. [Holiday 2011, p.80]