Hard Reset

Let’s face it: the first-person shooter is becoming increasingly stale these days. Sure, the occasional gem appears now and again, but every shining example of the genre is accompanied by twice as many substandard copies. For every Halo, there’s a Haze; for every Battlefield and Call of Duty, there’s a Homefront; for every Timesplitters, there’s a (Christ) Duke Nukem Forever. Gone are the days of blasting everything in front of you until it falls down dead. These days it’s all about ducking into cover, popping your head out every so often, aiming carefully to conserve your ammo and not getting hit to regain your health like a pussy. The genre is in dire need of a reset.

So it’s a good thing there’s a Hard Reset on the way.

The preview build from Flying Wild Hog, the Polish developer, including staff from People Can Fly, the, well, people behind Bulletstorm, starts off with a highly-detailed menu screen involving probing and slightly invasive robot arms operating the interface. The first thing you’ll notice is how nice the graphics are even at this mundane point of the demo. Despite the animations taking slightly longer than they should, meaning it soon becomes something of a pain to navigate, such a screen subtly introduces you to the world that the game is set in.

And what a world it is. Much like in Max Payne, the crapsack future world that Hard Reset takes place in is exquisitely characterised by comic book-style loading screens featuring fine sketches and excellent voice-acting. After these, the game drops you into the dirty dystopia, a world populated by flying cars, glaring neon signs and an atmosphere of underlying filth that you can never really shift. A blend of elements from a whole range of sci-fi tales lend their ideas to the city: the player character tracking down rogue robots, an organisation that keeps a close eye on its citizens, adverts that play when you move your cursor over them combine to create a believable, intriguing and ultimately fascinating game world. It’s a joy to explore the cyan-hued city even before the gunplay begins.

Your main enemy in Hard Reset are a bunch of automatons set out to hack, slash and chop you to bits, so it’s very handy that you have two beefy weapons with which to disable your attackers: the C.L.N. Firearm and the N.R.G. Weapon. Forget the armaments you get in more realistic games, with their wimpy firepower and constant requirement to reload; here, we go back to the good old days of Doom and Quake. See an enemy? Hold down the trigger until it’s dead, rinse and repeat. There’s ammo aplenty, so you need never fear running out of ammunition with which to mow down your enemies with.

You also need not worry about being limited to only two weapons. Electronic stores you come across every so often enable you to beef up your guns even further. With enough credits, you can slap a shotgun module, a grenade launcher and an RPG onto your C.L.N. or a lightning arc launcher cannon thing onto your N.R.G. Weapon. These modifications effectively mean you’ve constantly got not one, but two BFGs at your disposal. As such, it makes you feel like an unstoppable force of justice in a genre populated by games where you’re consistently not special and only one of a dispensible many.

So it’s a bit of a shame that the über tough enemies make you feel otherwise. Yes, they’re more powerful than you to remind you that you’re only human, but sometimes they can feel a bit too durable. It’s a frequent occurrence to be surrounded by enemies both big and small, all of which take a heap of punishment to go down, zerg rushing and utterly, utterly annihilating you. Larger enemies can even kill you in one hit, negating the feeling you have of playing as a total badass.

Overall, Hard Reset is a welcome injection of exhilaration into the FPS vein. Expertly mixing elements from a tonne of sci-fi sources like Quake, Doom, Blade Runner, Minority Report, The Matrix, etc. Flying Wild Hog has created a world solidified by realistic physics and diegetic interfaces and compounded by solid and unashamedly burly balls-to-the-wall shooting.  The only off-putting things thus far are the overly tough enemies and a very slight delay in looking around, two issues that will hopefully be addressed by the time the game releases. If they are, and Hard Reset sticks to its guns,  the banality of other modern shooters will soon be lost in time, like tears in rain…