Get Hard
There’s a lot of talk about the upcoming robot apocalypse. AI is going to take everyone’s jobs, program the planes and then somehow create a time-traveling Basilisk that will put us all in torture chambers for eternity. Something like that. I skimmed through the article. The only thing I know is that the robot-dominated future will be horrible and inevitable. A bad combination. Luckily, we have years of media to teach us what to do, and the solution is always the same: get a gun and shoot the robots in the face. Skynet might be sentient and all that, but a 9mm to the motherboard will still do some damage.
Hard Reset is all about that, taking up arms and shooting appliances, and much like the looming apocalypse, it kinda sucks. It has some good ideas, level design and pacing, but it’s bogged down by almost everything else. I hope the future isn’t like Hard Reset, or else it won’t be the robots that get us, but the boredom.
Gameplay
Hard Reset Redux, or how the cool kids call it, Hard-R, is a first person shooter. Your goal is to get to the end of the level while mowing down hordes of metallic horrors with a large arsenal of mostly redundant weapons. You’ll rampage through city blocks, factories and any other place that’s grey and full of pipes while fighting the same four enemies.
The game is in a strange no-man’s land between boomer shooter and modern shooter. From the boomer shooter, it takes its weapon designs, constant combat, simplified key-hunting and strafe-heavy gameplay. From the modern shooter, it inherits regenerating health, slow movement speed, an unnecessary sprint, a terrible progression system and constant yapping. This combination results in an amalgamation of the worst sides of both generations; the heavy movement and constant tedium of new shooters, and the simple gameplay of boomer shooters.
Don’t get me wrong, simple gameplay is not a bad thing, if done correctly. Quake is a very simple game, at least on the surface, but it’s still probably the best first person shooter ever. The problem with the simple gameplay comes when you don’t apply the fundamentals right. Things like good level design, useful weapons, challenging and well-placed enemies, smooth movement and good ammo management. All these small details come together to make something that is simple, but feels great to play. Hard Reset lacks a lot of these.
Shooting
The most basic thing in a shooter, is the shooting. Hence the name. If you somehow screw that up, the rest of your game might as well not exist. The guns should feel good to shoot; good feedback, satisfying sound effects, a visual indicator that your shots are hitting your target. These are a little subjective, but I’ll try my best to explain them.
The guns in Hard Reset don’t give you much when you use them. There isn’t much feedback when you pull the trigger. When you fire a shotgun, you expect it to shoot out a blast of projectiles and kick like a mule. The one in Hard Reset spits out its shot unceremoniously, less like it’s trying to kill its target and more like it’s ordering at Arby’s. There’s barely any visual recoil on the gun, and the shot itself looks weak. The same goes for all the other weapons. When you shoot, the guns sort of spawn the projectile and it rambles off.
This is all subjective, sure, but it’s a key part of the experience, since it’s what you’ll be doing 99% of the time. If I fire a gun in a game, and it doesn’t feel good, or powerful or like it’s doing anything, I’m not going to enjoy doing it. I consider this one of the most basic things a shooter should get right, and Hard Reset falls short in this department.
Not only do they feel pitiful to fire, they are pitiful in practice. Something that helps make your guns feel powerful, and has a direct impact on gameplay, is how much damage they do. Damage is a foreign concept to the guns in this game. You can unload three shotgun blasts directly into an enemy, at point-blank range, and they won’t feel anything. You can have the muzzle shoved halfway up their USB port, and they’d still shrug it off. It takes an entire gun store’s worth of ammo to take anything down, and it feels awful. Not only does it make your guns feel like they’re firing spit-balls, but it makes everything take forever to kill, making the game feel horrendously tedious.
Not that you’d know if anything is actually taking damage. Hard Reset uses something I like to call a faith-based system. There’s no real visual indication that your attacks are doing anything, so you take it on faith that your shots are hitting your target. When you shoot and enemy, there are hardly any hit-sparks. They don’t bleed, there aren’t chunks of metal flying off them, no sound to indicate that your bullets are making contact. Enemies don’t flinch or stagger, either. If you hit them with a rocket they might move one centimeter to the side, but that’s it. You shoot them and have faith that what you’re doing will result in an enemy dying, because it sure as hell won’t look like anything’s happening.
It lacks interaction. You shoot at something with a gun that doesn’t really look like it’s trying, to hit an enemy that takes forever to kill, who doesn’t even react to your shots at all until they die. It’s like you’re not really interfacing with the game. Sure, your actions make the enemies die, but it doesn’t feel like you did it. It’s less like shooting a robot with a gun and more like changing a channel with a remote. Mind you, this is the thing you’ll be doing throughout the entire game, and it feels like crap.
Weapons
Speaking of these crappy boys, let’s talk a bit more about the weapons. Other than being complete water guns, they’re also redundant. You have a massive arsenal spread over two guns, and they mostly serve the same purpose.
What do I mean by two guns? Well, you have the bullet gun and the energy gun. Why two guns? Do they do anything different? Do they deal different types of damage? No. They just look different. One fire bullets and explosives, the other goes pew-pew-pew and fires electricity. They each have five shooting modes:
Machine gun: Shoots bullets/electricity fast.
Shotgun: Shoot a weak blast of pellets out of the bullet gun, a continuous arc of electricity from the energy gun.
Grenade Launcher: Shoot a small, pitiful grenade from the bullet gun. The energy gun fires a grenade that deals constant damage in an area.
From here, they start to differ.
The bullet gun gets a rocket launcher and another grenade launcher. The rocket launcher fires the slowest rocket known to man. If this had been the rocket used to send Neil Armstrong to the moon in 1969, they’d still be on their way there. The only word I could use to describe the projectile, other than slow, is lethargic. It flies out of the barrel like with the speed and enthusiasm of a dead pigeon, and it is about as useful as one.
The grenade launcher also sucks. No, I haven’t gone senile. I know I already said grenade launcher, this gun has two of them for some reason. I called the arsenal redundant, but I bet you didn’t expect them to repeat things on the same gun, did you? Now that’s innovation. The second grenade launcher fires proximity mines. Guess what? They suck. It fires one grenade every election cycle and they barely do anything. If you think you can use it to create traps and lure enemies in, you’re dead wrong. By the time you fire your second mine, you’ll already have an entire army of robots stepping on your head. Even if you do manage to stack a few, the enemies will walk over them and feel nothing. I call this weapon the insanity gun, because I used it a few times and it was so ineffective that I was starting to question if it even was a real gun, and I started doubting my own sanity.
The energy gun gets a rail gun and a smart gun. The rail gun is one of the few useful weapons in this game. It fires a laser, like you’d expect a rail gun to do. It does decent damage, which still doesn’t mean much in this game, and it can hit targets that are far away. It’s one of the few guns in this game that I’d give a passing grade to. The smart gun, on the other hand? Fails. Insufficient. It calls itself smart, but it’s far from it. This gun is so dumb it would fail a blood test. I know guns don’t have blood, but you get the idea. It fires a homing projectile. It’s slow to fire and does less damage than the rail gun, so why would you bother with this? The only time you’d use this is if your mouse stopped working and you couldn’t aim. At that point I wouldn’t use the smart gun, I’d stop playing the game. I’d take it as a sign from God to turn the game off and go do something useful.
The way the guns work is that each gun has its five firing modes, and they’re separate arsenals. To change from one to the other, you press the button for the other gun, then the button for the firing mode you want. If you want to use the rocket launcher, you press F1 for the bullet gun, then 4 for the rocket launcher. Two key presses for a weapon.
Now you might be thinking “Five weapons plus five weapons equals ten weapons. Why not just use all ten number keys like every other shooter?”. Well, reader, it’s because you are a normal, rational human being, and this game wasn’t made by those. When they made this two gun system, they thought it was something new and cool, but they didn’t stop to think if it was necessary or fun. It’s neither.
If you recall a few paragraphs back, I mentioned how the enemies take forever to kill because they have a ton of health, and your guns don’t do much damage. The way to kill an enemy in under 20 minutes is to constantly switch weapons. You fire with the rocket launcher, and instead of waiting a decade for it to fire again, you switch to another weapon and fire. This leads to all fights feeling less like a shoot-out, and more like a piano concerto, as you frantically press multiple keys to switch weapons. Instead of using one gun and switching when the situation calls for it, you now have to switch to three different guns.
Wait, there is a reason for there to be two guns. They have different ammo pools. The bullet gun uses bullets and the energy gun uses energy. If you use one, it runs out of ammo, so you switch to the other, right? That’s how it works in theory, but this system is a solution to a problem the game created.
Each firing mode uses the same ammo. Every bullet weapon, the machine gun, grenade launcher, other grenade launcher, etc, all use the red ammo type. If you fire a few rockets, you’ll run out of ammo and won’t be able to fire your machine gun. So you switch to the energy gun and use that machine gun instead.
This constant switching feels pointless, and again, like a solution to a problem the game caused. You need to switch from one type to the other because the game tells you to, not because it’s the natural thing to do. This system is completely superfluous and annoying. Since all firing modes use the same ammo, you don’t have to pick and choose which guns to use. Just use the most powerful ones all the time. Sure, you’ll run out of ammo, but you run out of ammo trying to kill anything in this game, so it’s a moot point.
Another issue I have with the guns has to do with the game’s combat design. This uses the modern shooter approach to combat, where you get put in an arena and enemies teleport in. There aren’t enemies placed naturally throughout the level. This means that there isn’t much of a need for situational guns like the grenade launcher. In other shooters, like Quake, the grenade launcher is used to hit enemies around corners. In Hard Reset, you fight enemies in specially designed arenas that don’t really call for that. Enemies are constantly running at you, so you never need to lob a projectile around a corner or over cover. You always have a clear line of sight. It doesn’t help that the grenade launcher is also useless as a weapon.
This problem could be fixed easily by making the enemies react to your fire. Take Serious Sam as an example. Serious Sam also uses special arenas for combat, and enemies are always running at you. The reason why the grenade launcher works in Serious Sam and not in Hard Reset is because, in Serious Sam, enemies react to getting hit with it. They flinch. If you fire it at a group of enemies, it stops them in their tracks momentarily and resets their attack pattern, letting you control them. Since the enemies in Hard Reset shrug off your bullets, hitting them with a grenade does nothing. So why bother with the slow, tiny grenade that barely does any damage in an area when you can use the rail gun to kill everything and anything?
The guns also have a secondary fire mode. Most of them freeze the enemy in place. This is how the game does crowd control, with hard stuns. They’re cooldown based, too. Fun. This leads to more redundancy in how the guns work, since they mostly have the same primary and secondary fire. It also makes crowd control into a defined, static state. It’s not something you do dynamically as you fight enemies. It’s a button you press to make the enemies stop moving for a bit so you can shoot them. Much like everything else in this game, it’s not fun nor interactive.
If the shooting sucks and the guns themselves suck, there’s not much hope for Hard Reset, is there? What’s next? Am I going to say the enemies suck, too?
Enemies
The enemies in Hard Reset suck, too. There are around 6 enemy types, and they all bring their own flavor of frustration. They range from tiny robots that run at you to giant bugs that constantly fire missiles. None of them react to your shots and most take ages to kill.
The most common enemy type are the tiny bipedal robots. They’re tanky and very fast. Their game plan is to run at you in a straight line and beat you to death. They have a nasty habit of getting behind you, or sneaking just under your line of sight, since they’re so small. They do a ton of damage and they swarm you easily. They’re a complete nuisance, and the most common enemy in the game. You’ll be fighting dozens upon dozens of them all throughout the campaign.
The second most common enemy are the gorillas. These are giant torso-looking things that stomp around and charge at you like a bull for massive damage. They’re extremely tanky, taking around 4 grenades and 4 rockets to kill. I didn’t say four grenades OR four rockets. I said AND. It takes four of both to take them down. They spawn in groups of up to 6 and they all charge at you. They have variants that have more health. There’s a rocket variant that spams rockets and has around three times more health than the regular gorilla. These are a nightmare.
The only other noteworthy enemy is the giant bug robot that shows up in the last two stages. These are basically minibosses. They could take a direct hit with a nuclear missile and they’d be unharmed. All they do is stand in one spot and rain down infinite rockets. They just shoot them out and they track you and deal an insane amount of damage. An infection would be more fun to fight than these guys.
The enemies all sort of rush you and deal tons of damage. There are only a few types, which makes each combat encounter feel the same. Once you’ve fought one group of tiny bots and a few gorillas, you’ve seen all the game has to offer. The fact that they can take multiple rockets to the face and survive makes each fight take forever to complete, making the game feel like a complete slog.
Level Design
The level design is honestly pretty alright. Most arenas are built well, they give you enough room to move around while also giving you a few pieces of junk for cover, so not every fight is in a giant, empty room.
Each arena is full of explosives to shoot at. Explosive barrels, air conditioners that spit out arcs of electricity, cars that explode like they’re Teslas, and so on. These are a nice addition to the game, as they give you an incentive to move around and guide enemies into them. They also deal much more damage than your guns, to the point where, in a lot of fights, your guns are mostly there to activate environmental hazards.
The one issue I found with these is that they can be very random. If you lure an enemy to an explosive barrel and shoot, the barrel explodes and it takes out your enemy, but it also detonates every other environmental hazard in a massive chain reaction, leaving you with nothing else to use. There are other interactables, like the gas tanks and some explosive barrels, which fly off in random directions when shot. You might have an enemy standing on a pile of gas tanks ready to get sent to the moon, you shoot at them, and they all fly off into another room where they detonate safely, leaving your enemy unharmed. This kind of thing wasn’t constant enough to make this mechanic useless, but it happened enough to be a steady source of frustration.
There’s a lot of nonsense puzzle solving between fights. The puzzles never get more complicated than “go to the panel and press the button”, but they can get annoying. Knowing where to go and what to do gets a bit convoluted at points thanks to how the levels look. A lot of the stages are grey and brown industrial messes of pipes. They’re pretty linear, but every now and then you get into a crossroads that isn’t very clear. Do you have to go into the tangle of pipes next, or into the nest of pipes? Neither. You had to go into the lattice of pipes.
These little puzzles feel like more like padding thanks to the constant hints that basically tell you what to do. You’re not solving a puzzle, you’re following instructions. Sure, you can deactivate the hints, but then you run into the pipe problem again, where you have to find the next objective in a level that looks like an amazon warehouse after its shelves collapsed.
Sound
Hard Reset sounds like scrap metal in a blender. The guns all have high-pitched metallic sounds, the enemies are always squeaking and grunting and even the music sounds like two car compactors having an argument.
The bullet machine gun sounds like screws being sucked into a vacuum cleaner at high speeds. The explosives all sound weak and flaccid. The energy gun leans into the electric side of things, offering high-pitched crackling and laser sounds. The arc shotgun is one of the main offenders in this category. It serenades you with a constant electric buzz that’s about as pleasant to listen to as a telemarketer.
Whenever there’s an enemy on screen they’re making some kind of noise. It’s usually some metallic clanging or distorted grunts. They all do it individually, and when there are over a dozen enemies on screen at once it turns into some hellish choir of metal scraping on metal.
The music doesn’t help much. Some of the later battle tracks are nice, fast-paced electronic music that do a good job driving the action forward, but a lot of the music in the early game sounds like taking a screwdriver to the brain.
The soundscape overall is pretty horrible. It’s loud, abrasive and non-stop. Every few seconds my ears were assaulted by some technological brown note. The loud, busy and noisy battle themes combined with the enemies’ constant grunts and squeals and the guns’ pitiful noise all came together in a truly remarkable symphony. It’s like I could feel the robot’s pure hatred for me. It was like listening to seven car crash compilations at the same time, while also being in an actual car crash.
This sound design is a hate crime and I want to see justice brought down on those responsible. I have a throbbing headache thanks to this and have taken enough Tylenol to kill a herd of elephants. It’s still not enough.
Conclusion
Hard Reset kind of sucks, man. It’s graciously short, at around 4 hours, but it feels like a lifetime thanks to its repetitive combat encounters. You fight the same configuration of enemies two hundred times throughout the campaign. To add insult to injury, they all take forever to complete thanks to the tanky enemies and your weak weapons.
The shooting feels limp. The guns, from their sound and animation, to how the don’t affect the enemies they hit, feel like a waste of time to use. It takes a ton of rockets to kill basic enemies, and it doesn’t feel like you’re doing much to them while shooting. The need to constantly switch between weapons and the dual ammo system is dumb as all hell and exhausting. It’s more of a nuisance than anything.
I don’t think I could recommend Hard Reset. If you’re a hardcore FPS junkie and you’ve played everything else, you might get some enjoyment out of this. The moment-to-moment gameplay isn’t awful, and there is some fun to be had with the environmental destruction, and some of the combat encounters are well designed, but it really gets old quick. The game takes a noticeable nosedive during the last hour, which in a game that’s 4 hours long, means the entire final fourth of the game isn’t that good. The final boss is a complete disappointment, too.
I didn’t even mention the upgrade system, but this game has one. You spend points to buy new guns. There are very few guns to buy and they feel like they should come standard. You have to upgrade to use the rocket launcher, which sucks. The weapon sucks, not just the fact that you have to unlock it. That also sucks.
When it comes to progression systems, my philosophy is that they’re usually unnecessary. They hide content behind an arbitrary lock. If there has to be a progression system, I’d rather it be the icing on top of an already good cake. Instead of unlocking basic weapons like the grenade launcher or the shotgun as “upgrades”, why not add something new and interesting to the weapons? Spend points to make your shotgun fire all its ammo in one shot, or make the rocket launcher stick to an enemy and turn them into a bomb. Fun, optional stuff that makes an already useful and fun arsenal into something interesting and new.
I’m a simple guy. I have a motto for these types of games: You give me gun, I have fun. I had some fun with Hard Reset during its first few moments, but then it got tiring. The time between play sessions got longer and longer, and my enjoyment drained faster and faster. Still, I managed to finish it twice, on normal and hard, so it wasn’t all terrible. Just kind of bad, which is more than I could say for something like Gungrave GORE, which I could barely get through.
I hold shooters to the Quake standard. Quake is a fanstastic game. It came out in 1996, it’s almost 30 years old as of writing this, and it still hasn’t been topped. It’s not a complicated game. What makes it shine is its superb level design, excellent enemies, its well thought out weapons. It’s a fundamentally solid game. Most shooters don’t pass meet these basic standards set decades ago, and Hard Reset is one of those games. It fails in its weapons and enemies, and gets a soft pass on its level design. Quake still mogs it.
If Hard Reset is any indication of what the upcoming robot apocalypse will be like, I think we’re safe. We’ll just need some really good earplugs.
