What’s Good About Hard Reset Redux
Continuing the trend of doing things differently after a month of Resident Evil, today we’re looking at Hard Reset Redux because it was $2 when I bought it last week and figured where is the harm in giving it a fair shake? So far, it’s a decent little cyberpunk-themed first-person shooter with some interesting weapon mechanics.
Let’s get it out of the way right now, the story, while not offensive, is also not too memorable either. You mostly play as a member of the security team of the last human-held city in the world following a robot uprising and the machines have broken through. It’s your job to recycle them. I’ll be real, it’s not the self ware silliness of the recent Doom games or Viscerafest’s surprisingly well-written setup, but as a means of giving me a justification to turn my brain off and send a bunch of robots and cyborgs to the scrap heap, it does its job well enough.
Hard Reset’s aesthetics are probably the coolest thing about it. It manages to both be dark and colorful at the same time in a way that makes sense. Lots of grey concrete and metal mixed with bright and colorful neon signs that display in-universe ads and are even used for some in-game user interfaces. Its best trick is the use of bright primary colors to denote pickups for health, ammo, and experience, leading it to feel like a video game ass video game, but in a way that makes it feel readable while not sacrificing the tone it’s established for the world.
Mechanically, Hard Reset Redux plays like an older style First Person Shooter, although its inspirations are more Painkiller and Serious Sam as opposed to the Build Engine Games or Doom and Doom 2. This leads to combat being much more arena-focused, dealing with hordes of enemies and back-peddling whilst doing so and fulfilling story objectives through boxes of dialogue and exploration as opposed to finding and color coordinating keys and doors to proceed. It largely works for what it is because it doesn’t try to be anything else. It’s a nice way to spend some time and it works
The main crux is the main weapons. There are six in total, each with its own alternate fire mode. But the main catch is that they are all individual modes of two main weapon modules. With the CLN and NRG (I see what they did there) guns having access to firms such as an assault rifle, shotgun, and grenade launcher for the former and a plasma rifle, rail gun, and a third one I haven’t unlocked yet for the latter. All of them have their place and are needed to take out the game’s menagerie of mechanical monstrosities. It’s also got the Redux in the name because it does a bunch of rebalancing of the game’s core mechanics, but I never played the original version of Hard Reset when it first came out, so I can’t properly tell what’s changed or not. But I will say that it felt well balanced enough from my time with it. Oh wait, now I remember; you get one extra weapon in the form of a straight-up Katana because it would not be a Cyberpunk game otherwise apparently?
As a means of burning through a weekend, Hard Reset Redux is a good time. It’s not gonna set the world on fire, but I got way more than I paid for considering that this game was $2 when I got it. If you’re looking for a cyberpunk-themed first-person shooter, this is definitely a good choice to make.
