Hard Reset is an action-packed, single-player shooter. Set in a beautifully realized cyberpunk city, it emphasizes over-the-top destruction and gives you a large variety of weapons to dispatch hordes of enemies. Featuring a cyberpunk plot that drawis inspiration from William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Philip K. Dick, especially Blade Runner and Screamers. The world as we know it ceased to exist. Humanity is at the verge of extinction, living in the last closed city of Bezoar. Mankind wages war against the machines controlling vast areas of what became the 'Barrens'. Machines want to control and assimilate 'The Sanctuary' a network that holds billions of digitalized human minds. Our hero, Maj. Fletcher, is a soldier of CLN - a corporation combat unit, established to protect the city. Machines are constantly assaulting the walls of Bezoar. Fletcher moves in when Bezoar's protective barrier is breached.
This game is hard to review. Despite the developers wanting to make an old-school game, this ended up not being completely true, mainly because of the checkpoint system and no manual save which can make higher difficulty level more challenging than fun, but also because of the sprint key. They also decided to pick a bad (for me) old-school feature, or lack of, which is the inability to crouch. It feels kinda weird to not being able to crouch when it could save you from death sometimes.
Yes, graphics, this game's best selling point probably. It's simply awesome and certainly it doesn't look like an indie game on this side. It's actually much better looking than many, if not most, of the mainstream FPS games released in the last years.
Gameplay is not bad at all, but the lack of crouching and of a proper save system kinda ruined the fun. The game's also kinda slow for my tastes, and sprinting is definitely not enough as it only lasts a very few seconds.
There are a big amount of weapons, though, which has some interesting alternate fire mode that can cope with the inability of the character to move decently enough to counter enemies, and that's probably the part that requires the most learning in this game, as the enemies are easy to learn.
Being able to use the right mix of weapon and their various alternate modes will be essential in some parts of the game, especially at higher difficulty levels.
The audio compartment is nice, with proper sound effect and a good soundtrack.
Replayability is also decent, to beat your friends' scores in the main campaign or in the survival levels. More content coming soon will make it even better.
So a good game for its price, and that's the main reason for my score (more expensive and I would have lowered it), but the lack of a real multiplayer mode (coop would be awesome) and the sudden end of the single-player campaign while in the middle of the story really makes this game feel incomplete.