Hard Reset Redux

cool old school shooter

This is actually a pretty solid game. Strong Bioshock vibes, but with more of a Bladerunner aesthetic. Purchase upgrades at upgrade stations as you play, a little bit of destructable terrain, explosive barrels, neon glowing pickups. It could do with a bit more sex appeal, but the characters aren't deliberately hideous either.
I got it on sale for less than £2.00. At that price I'm pretty happy with it. Wouldn't pay more than that tho.

Hard Reset Redux needs a hard shutdown.

Story

If there IS a story here, it's utterly unfinished and lost in translation. Set in the year 2436, players take on the role of a man named Fletcher who describes himself as a soldier for the unironically named "Corporation" who defend a city called Bezoar from a horde of robots that threaten it. That's the most concrete information you'll get for the rest of the game. It'll spout several unexplained terms like "exterior AI" and allude to all sorts of ideas like Fletcher somehow being special and able to "assimilate AI" but none of this is ever explained in even the vaguest terms. By the halfway point of the game, it gives up on pretending to have a plot entirely and waters itself down to being a simple monster hunt before ending on a cliff hanger so laughably undeserved that it beggars belief. It's blatantly clear that the script was translated into English by someone who only has a general grasp of the language, and the actors clearly didn't care to point out the strange grammar and syntax to help improve their lines; but even if they had, that would just leave you with a more natural sounding script that still has nothing to say and goes nowhere.

Gameplay

HRR is a first person shooter that is painfully shallow in nature. The player begins the game with two weapons which they'll hang onto for the rest of the game: a machine gun and a machine gun but it shoots blue bullets instead. As enemies are defeated, the play will gain a resource called N.A.N.O. which can also be found scattered and hidden around the levels. When the N.A.N.O. bar is filled, a credit is earned which can be spent at upgrade stations placed in each linear level to upgrade one of your two guns or you character himself. These upgrades range from useless to game breaking, with the later effectively being available from the outset. Both guns can be upgrade with an additional four transformation modes, some of which will carry you through every single fight and some of which seem like they were included purely as a means of filling out the roster. The blue machine gun can get a sticky mortar that lashes everything around it with lightning for several seconds; dealing damage and stunning smaller enemies for the entire duration, which takes longer to end than the cooldown of the gun itself does. None of the weapon modes are particularly novel or satisfying to use, and the character upgrades amount to small 20% bonuses on stats like HP and ammo counts. There's also a sword the player can find which probably would be a good weapon to learn to use if not for the fact that many of the game's larger threats have AoE attacks that make you pay for daring to use it. Enemy variety is next to non-existent, as is enemy AI. On Normal difficulty, the game is a chore to get through as you slaughter waves of brain dead robots who you'll see from beginning to end. On harder difficulties, individual enemies are a chore to fight as they stand there too stupid to hit you but with HP bars to beefy it'll take almost all your ammo just to kill one of them. The game has a few boss fights which just come down to "shoot the orange glowing bits" until they die while the final fight has one tiny twist so simple you could remove it and the fight wouldn't really change.
If for some reason the campaign wasn't tortuous enough to scare you away, the game also features a wave based Survival mode.

Presentation

Ugly with occasional bits of genuinely pleasing atmosphere. Enemy designs are childishly stupid looking and resemble the sort of thing an eight year old might draw if you told them to make an evil robot. Even the ones with a little bit of human body horror to them just raise questions you'll never get answers for. The world itself starts out looking like a blend between genuine art and a bad cyberpunk parody and by the end, you'll be running through a literal dumpster for five levels straight. Sound design is incredibly generic and uninteresting and the music is, at best, somewhat moody at times when all is quiet. Other times, despite the calm surrounding you, the music is just dragging nails on a chalkboard in your ear. Combat tracks are especially egregious to have to hear and sound like whoever wrote them believed he was scoring a comedy sci-fi game. Cutscenes are told with barely animated comic book style art that tends to use only the color black so often can be hard to tell what you're even looking at in a scene, and the game just gives up on having cutscenes at all in the latter half of the game. Voice acting is actually pretty decent and if weren't for the abysmmal script, might have been a lot better.

Predecessor to the Shadow Warrior reboot. Made with the same engine. If you already own it, it offers some decent gun play, nothing great. The story is whatever. Cringy voiceovers. It's ok for a quick bite.

TLDR: The uninspired world, boring narrative, and annoying gun mechanics make me not want to play or recommend this game.

PROS:

➕Quality remake from a technical perspective

NEUTRALS:

🔹Unable to crouch
🔹Lazy achievements

CONS:

➖Underwhelming narrative
➖Too many gun variants with slow weapon swapping
➖Bland and boring world
➖Lack of interesting upgrades

Content (Game world/Narrative/Length) – [4/10]

Boring game world and forgettable/confusing narrative

Gameplay (Mechanics/Difficulty) – [4/10]

11 gun options and only ~3 of them are worth using. Switching between weapons is a pain.

Graphics (Quality/Performance) – [5/10]

Bland art style with everything being so similar. Graphical fidelity is average, just feels so uninspired.
Runs well, I ran into no bugs.
i9-13900KF | RTX 4090 | 64GB RAM | 1440p @ 240hz | Windows 11 installed on SSD

Audio – [5/10]

Average, nothing really noteworthy here.

Replay Factor (Longevity) – [3/10]

Aside from a ton of achievements, most of which are just the same thing but playing through the level on a higher difficulty, there doesn’t seem to be much to do. Maybe maximizing level run score?

Final Verdict – [4/10]

I never played Hard Reset, so Hard Reset Redux (HRR) is my entry into the series. I decided to buy this game after enjoying my time with Flying Wild Hog’s Shadow Warrior series. Unfortunately, HRR misses much of what makes Shadow Warrior so fun.

My two largest issues with HRR are the annoying amount of gun options you have and the boring/bland world. To summarize the world first, I was consistently underwhelmed with the bland and boring game world of the future. The gameplay largely consists of moving from one uninteresting corridor to the next through the gameplay guise of unlocking doors and shooting machines. HRR does not utilize anything about a future cyberpunk-ish that makes it interesting or engaging. Furthermore and equally disheartening is the narrative is as boring as the game world is bland.

As for the gun aspect, normally more options are good, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. How HRR does weaponry is you have 2 options - a rifle and a plasma gun (and later a sword), each being bound to F1 and F2, respectively. Each gun has 5 fire modes with tons of overlap. You have the rifle grenade which is pretty much the plasma mortar, or the rifle shotgun that is the plasma burst. Generally, there is a fire mode that is more effective towards certain types of enemies, like the shotgun/burst is for the swarms that hound you, where the RPG or railgun for stronger single targets. Oftentimes you’ll get a combination of enemies like a swarm pack with a strong single target. Flipping between F1+4 and then F2+2 constantly is just cumbersome and utterly annoying, amplified by the fact that each weapon swap takes a second or two. These 11 weapon choices could be easily consolidated down to half at most.

Overall, while the game world and narrative were mediocre at best, those combined with the annoying combat made me retire HRR after 3.5 hours. I made it through about 6 or 7 levels of mundane before I had enough. As such I cannot recommend this game, but instead would recommend the Shadow Warrior series by the same developer. It’s not perfect, but Flying Wild Hog seemed to have learned from many of the issues plaguing Hard Reset when developing that series.

Recommend? [Y/N]

No

You can find my curator page here: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Synik_GR

Solid enough Cyberpunk-esque FPS from the 2010s. It wont' knock your socks off but it is fun for most of the game's duration, other than a few grindy achievements and one particularly annoying boss battle.

I recommend Hard Reset for FPS newcomers who need help with mastering movement, aiming, and target prioritization.

Very fun shooter with a short lenght but very replayable, the improvements and changes from the original to Redux make the experience a lot less frustrating and feel like a fair challenge. I beat the game in hard, insane and heroic mode and I thought I was going to struggle a lot more. The cyberpunk setting is fantastic and the encounters feel chaotic and fun. Quick switching weapons is very important, trying to keep them stunned as long as possible helps a lot to deal with the biggest threats. If you re looking for a game that scratches that Serious sam/Painkiller itch, then I really recommend giving Hard reset redux a try.

mediocre shooter

Recommended

Yeah this is a very neat shooter, honestly. One of these days I'd like to revisit it.

Good fun

I was pleasantly surprised by how well crafted this game is, as I had expected a much worse experience. The first thing I think is that killing robots in video games is a really boring thing, and it's never a good idea to plan enemies for your future game around them. The way it's done in Hard Reset is actually quite enjoyable, perhaps because there are so many destructive and explosive things littering around, that you get this WOW effect when you accidentally shoot one of the convenient explosives around, causing half the screen to go down.

It's cool, give it a try if you like brainless FPS for an evening or two.

Initially was worried that I was "only" shooting robots, but quickly realized this was real classic fast paced gunplay with a broad weapon variety and a nice destructible-ish environment that was worth playing through for an afternoon FPS romp with decent, well performing graphics. On sales or in bundles it costs 2-5 bucks - super worth it!

Great game. Doom style gameplay. Works pretty great on steam deck. I did have one issue while playing on steam deck, on on a level it would freeze and I needed to exit game and reload. But all in all, it's a great game just to past the time.

Best things about it: levels have a lot of stuff to blow up (and to blow enemies up with), the weapon mechanics are interesting (you have two main weapons, and what would be a weapon in a regular shooter are just "mods" for them), the graphics look nice (to my liking) and it runs good (duh, it's 2024)

Not so good things about it: story is incomprehensible and practically non-existent (who cares), kind of repetitive (although I'd say it ends almost at the perfect moment to not overstay its welcome) and the last enemy that is introduced is a bullet sponge and kind of sucks (although you don't see much of it), bloom is overwhelming xD

You can see where they were coming from making a Shadow Warrior reboot after that

Hard Reset: Redux is a game that will appeal to the boomer-shooter audience, more specifically the part of that audience that have played Shadow Warrior reboot and liked it, and probably to no one else.

This game is a hiddem gem!

It takes place in a futuristic city and you will have to fight robots!

The game mechanics are simple but the gameplay is very enjoyable!

It deserves a sequel!

Some gun combos are cool. I wish it was easier to switch between conventional and energy weapons. The storyline is incomprehensible.

Trash game. Good trash but trash nonetheless. 5/10.

-Bugs/Performance: This culminates all the problems with this game. There are just so many janky movements, AI getting stuck in debris, Doors being locked which requires reload save, Missiles disappearing. It is just a mess of design. I did not find many bugs but when I did, they were absolutely infuriating. Most fixes to my problems was reload save which made me be an expert at pressing F5. You then have very awkward movement that crashing into everything and every little ledge causes the character to act like it just stumbled. The telemetry of attacks and charges is also ridiculously inaccurate and will hit you even if you are far away. The only way to prevent damage seems to be with dash.

Overall, the game performs great and runs without a hitch but required a bit of tinkering at the start because it just would not run. Having to go out of my way to research how to play the game is abysmal.

-Gameplay: Boring repetitive first person shooter but has all the elements you want in a game. Objects around you are mostly destructible and it is fantastic watching them explode, taking out your enemies with it. Having hazards everywhere is very enjoyable. It has also a pretty good weapons system with upgrades, collectibles which absolutely sucked, variation of enemies but are mostly reskins of weaker versions, a "Dash"?.... literally the only thing that will keep you alive, explosions. Other than that, the game is deficient.

Most enemies are bullet sponges especially on the higher difficulties. The only way to fix that is upgrading RPG and Railgun to facilitate a speedier run. Most enemies have a charge in one direction, sometimes follows you a bit, and all you do is dash right. Actually, all you do is spam dash. Spam dash to avoid any kind of damage. Embodiment of Flash Gordon. Got surrounded? There is no way out because your jump is abhorrent, no way to jump over enemies. If this sounds fun to you, this is your game. It was very tedious for me.

-Story: Do not know, could not care.

-Graphics: Looks like a game from 2010. Not great or bad. It looks fine, nothing outstanding. I would say that the shooting and the explosions really look neat and adds to the immersion but, once you see the enemies close up it all falls apart.

-Level design: I would say it is a good attempt but mostly lacks logic and looks lacklustre most of the time. This game needed several grandiose sequences to really give the appeal of a horrific world where killer robots are in every corner. None of that exists here except for some jump scares here and there, some big spaces which required more work to be awe inducing. Nothing impactful can be found in this game.

While not absolutely bad, but pretty dull. Shooting enemies is just sparkles glittering on them until they explode, without any oomph on it. Protagonist's attitude was very cliche "Tough Guy", and listening him caused mainly serious second-hand embarrassment.

As a shooter it's okay, so you could get it from huge sale.

Good.

Cyberpunk Doom. The best way I can describe this game.

Hard Reset is an old school FPS, similar to Doom. Excellent 3D engine and engaging music/sounds create a compelling immersion. It's fast, nearly everything has ragdoll physics, and includes a lot of destruction. Story line is difficult to follow but serves it's purpose. Awesome game, recommended!

it is not bad but feels very bland most of the time
gameplay is kinda repetitive but to me it was tolerable, gunplay was good but story was very generic. overall it was fun experience but not at the same level as shadow warrior if i was played this game in 2011 i wouldve loved it to be honest. overall if you like fast paced fps games you can try it but if you arent fan of the genre i dont think you can have grip on this game

Oldschool fun. Surprisingly good graphics, especially lighting. Weapons look quirky but are a lot of fun to use, especially energy weapons and grenade launcher. If you use the weapons for their intended situations you will always feel like a badass.

Pros :
+ Great weapons
+ Cool unlock / progression system
+ Loads of easy to find secrets
+ Every stray from beaten path is rewarded
+ Good pacing with swarms of small enemies, big enemies and boss fights
+ Really good mood and original art

Cons :
- Dialogues are hit n miss at best
- Comic book style story telling is ... serviceable
- Level design in linear and generally OK, but it's filled with cliches like you can't jump over barriers, can't crouch etc. ... this is no Half Life.

For the price I think it's well worth it. Very unique shooter. Just treat it as a simple, fun corridor shooter with gritty and a bit quirky cyberpunk atmosphere and you'll enjoy this.

There is nothing offensively bad about this game, but it's just bland.

Played the original, then again with the extended edition, now again with the Redux. Hard Reset is a fast paced, old-school, no reload, press S, cyberpunk boomer shooter. The enemies designs are unique and varied, and the weapons are terrific. If you like to blow shit up and look for secrets, you'll enjoy Hard Reset.

A great lesser-known retro FPS from the devs of the Shadow Warrior reboot before they made those games.
Has that good euro jank but is still an enjoyable campaign to play through. Interesting weapons and upgrade system, lots of secrets to find, and pretty environments. My biggest complaint is that the harder difficulties just make the enemies more spongy rather than adding more.

Awesome graphics with old school vibs and Good mechanics in shooting & destruction but the game gets samey rather quick. Same enemies and assets over and over. The further in the game, the more it turns into a wave shooter instead of a story driven FPS.

Its a decent game 6.5/10.
The story is absolute trash but the setting and atmosphere of the game made me want to progress more. Loved the main menu song and dystopian city levels.

The immersion failed me, the story felt disconnected from the game as if it's from different game. But the gameplay is alright I kinda able to follow along & not let it bother me, since it's linear anyway. Get it on sale & you'll get nothing to complain.

Playability / Enjoyability 8/10
Graphics / Sound 8/10
Wokeness / ESG Score 0/10
Story / Writing 3/10
Replayability 4/10

I was expecting very little from this game having bought it on sale for under £1 and not having heard of it before. However I really enjoyed it. The setting is the best realisation of a "Blade Runner" type city I have played. The action is plentiful, the enemy robots, though not too varied, are challenging, and the graphics and sound very good. Story not great and progression very linear but there is no wokeness and this is lots of fun to play. Recommended.

Basic fun

Hard Reset commits the FPS cardinal sin of making enemies have more health at higher difficulty levels, instead of adjusting their spawns or AI. Enemies become RIDICULOUSLY bullet spongy at higher difficulties, which coupled with the fact that the majority of them don't stagger and don't show any visual indication of damage, quickly makes every encounter feel like a chore.

Level design actually starts off strong, visuals and gameplay wise, but gradually falls off, with the latter part of the city feeling less inspired, and the junkyard section being totally forgettable. The amount of destructible objects and environmental hazards also seems to decrease the farther in the game you are, again making it less fun the longer you play.

The weapon system is actually unique, with two weapons, one ballistic and one energy based, each being able to switch between five different configurations, most of which also have alt-fire modes. Juggling all these options on the fly to skip cooldowns feels rewarding, not unlike inputting combos. Sadly, again, the enemies being bullet spongy as they are really takes the fun out of it.

tldr Solid core gameplay, would be a great game with more varied level design and more responsive, less tanky enemies.

solid campaign