Hard Reset Redux Reviews

cool old school shooter

Negatives: - Not much in the way of real sex appeal. - No character customisation, no ability to play a female character. You play as John Redux. - You mostly be shooting robots. The problem with this is that shooting robots isn't very satisfying. It means there's no blood, there's no gore, & there's no gibs. Positives: - Low price, especially if you grab it on a deep sale. - Characters aren't deliberately ugly. - A remaster that doesn't censor anything (but there wasn't really that much to censor other than a few slightly spicy in-game commercials). - Explosive barrels. Notes: - The games narrative & setting seem to be a critique of consumerism; criticising the mindless consumption of slop. I have decided to take this message to heart & request a refund.

Hard Reset Redux needs a hard shutdown. [h1]Story[/h1] 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. [h1]Gameplay[/h1] 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. [h1]Presentation[/h1] 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.