Hard Reset

Hard Reset is like some strange and wondrous artifact from an alternate universe, one where technology continued to advance after the 90's, but none of the corridor shooter tropes we see in games nowadays ever caught on. It combines oldschool FPS gameplay from the Unreal era with shiny modern visuals, then adds a light sprinkling of modern shooter mechanics (a regenerating shield meter, two basic weapons that can be upgraded into several very different forms) that enhance the core gameplay without overwhelming it. Graphic novel-style cutscenes between levels tell a serviceable cyberpunk tale that provides context for all the shooting, but once the action starts, the story elements have the good grace to step aside and let you get down to business. The levels are open and reward exploration, with secrets to find and explosive items scattered about that let you set up environmental kills -

I picked this up for cheap and put it on the "do play" pile. After it finaly got to my notice I went through it and was plesently surprised. This game might not be perfect but in some respect it gives plenty of good shooting without most of the modern flaws that plague FPS genre. Let me get the downsides off first. The game is extremely linear. This is pretty much a coridor shooter with few hidden nooks and crannies that serve as game's secrets. There is very little variety in what you do, you go from one area, flip a switch fight enemies and move on. This in itself isn't a bad thing as long as the shooting is good, which it is. Another issue (which does have a fix) is the checkpoint system. You can't manualy save, for the most part it works fine but on harder difficulties there are sequences of encounters where there are no checkpoints in between and each encounter requires near flawle

Went in with no expectations and left 8 hours later think... that was a bloody fun game! So, imagine a movie from the 1980s, it's about Humans fighting machines, only the movie isn't Terminator, it's some B-Movie Polish Sci-Fi movie starring a guy that vaguly looks like Michael Biehn. They wanted to hire Michael Biehn to be the actor, but sadly the producer had spent the entire budget on the SFX - that's basically Hard Reset. Forget about trying to make sense of the story, which is pretty off the wall and has liberal use of swear words (like a teenager out of earshot of their parents). For this game isn't about an deep storyline where the plot is a social commentary - no; this game is about one thing... shooting robots. Lots of robots, and causing some really impressive explosions. That's where Hard Reset excels - making things explode. It has some of the best lighting effects I've s

TL:DR Endless shooter meets Bladerunner minus Harrison Ford or Ryan Gosling. The Good Stuff ++Achievement Hunters, this is the game for you +Cyberpunk setting mixed with some minor horror elements, not jumpscares but a sense of wanting to get the hell out of places (i.e. Abandoned hospitals) +The diffculties have a huge difference between them, you've been warned +You have 2 starting weapons, that can change into other weapons as you progress along and you can have a total of 10 different weapons plus perks for each one. Also the environment can brutally murder the enemies +No pausing for upgrades, cutscenes or anything of that sort during missions, everything just keeps moving making the game rather frantic and fast-paced +Interaction with upgrades and in-game computers are done on the spot with no seperate screen, kind of a neat mechanic, you'll see what I mean +Checkpoints in each m

If you're reading this, you already amaze me. This game is (or was, as of redux) ludicrously obscure. Simply put, Hard Reset is Bulletstorm done right. Made by 35 people on a budget of less than 5 million bucks, you can see the personality in this game. The gameplay is a solid case of using the environment to your advantage, and the soundtrack is some of the best cyberpunk-esque you're going to hear in a long, long time. The graphics put a very large number of triple a games to shame, and all in all the gameplay, sound design and aesthetic come together to make grenading a large group of enemies very, very, very satisfying. My one and only complaint, as you tend to have with budget titles, is that the story was visibly handled after the rest of the game, being told almost entirely through a comic book style series of cutscenes with voice acting (that sometimes doesn't even match up with

I kind of hate this game. Playing it well requires constantly harnessing the diversity of your arsenal, and I am just not good at fighting with more than one gun at a time. It is often difficult for me to assess a situation rapidly enough in the middle of battle—while my brain is consumed with the effort of dodging, shooting, and navigating to health and ammo pickups just in the nick of time—to see an opportunity for a better tactic represented by one of my other weapons. So it has been an extremely frustrating experience, particularly because I stubbornly insist on sticking with Hard difficulty to the end (just regular Hard, mind you; there is worse available, if you wish for it). I can only play one level per session because it's such an exhausting ordeal, and I've spent the entire latter half of the game wishing it would end already. Yet, objectively, I recognize that Hard Reset is