Shootember: Hard Reset

 Expectation is a hell of a thing.

Hard Reset was introduced to me as "an old school" FPS game. For me, that means Doom and ... This is not Doom. I'm just saying that right out because Doom is a piece of nostalgia to me that should not be invoked unless a game really feels old school. Maybe Hard Reset is middle-school, which I think is fair to it. It reminds me a bunch of Quake 3. I think this took a ton of my enjoyment right out of Hard Reset's hands, since telling me I'm going to experience Doom again is just so unfair to any game. I'm generally pretty good about nostalgia, having replayed many of the old games I once remembered fondly. But Doom man, Doom just is.

Doom to me is very similar a discussion as the early Sonic the Hedgehog games, with a wealth of features people can't seem to successfully weave together. Lots of callbacks and references, but they never seem to get there. Doom is essentially a 2d game pretending to be 3d, which is in and of itself a big part of why it works. It also features health packs, key cards, ammo attrition elements, back tracking, secret doors, a "lighting engine" that actually does something and a banging sound track that all add up to a surprisingly easy to mentally integrate atmosphere. Demons from Hell, stuff happened, you are shoot man, go forth and SHOOT. What Doom lacked in story, it made up in sentiment. Shoot man wanted to shoot his foes and felt a sense of accomplishment in trekking through each treacherous environment.

I could go on about Doom for hours, but it was fast, it was fluid, it didn't go out of its way to punish you but attrition kept the game tense. Even many modern elements would work fine in Doom, but the atmosphere is what I miss. I also miss, more than anything, the feel of bleak openness - I honestly think the open world sandbox games are much closer in design to Doom than most modern shooters. The games care less about aiming, more about movement and you feel way more powerful in Saint's Row 3 than you do in most FPS games.

If it sounds like I'm being hard on Hard reset in this comparison, I'm not really. I don't know that it's something they intentionally marketed their game to be or if the gaming press just picked up the idea. If there's one thing media loves, it is to A) bash modern fps games since they're the largest or at least most hyped up market B) Decrying the new school, they flip out and claim everything is old school that isn't a big budget AAA shooter.

Which is bizarre - There are different eras of shooters. Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Blakestone Aliens of Gold and a fair number of other early titles represent a fundamentally old school design. There's also middle ground between now and then, with many of the 'old school' elements actually being stuff from middle era or later games. The first Crysis for example barely feels like Doom but it doesn't feel like a chest high man shooter cinematic set piece game either.

Anyway to summarize what I mean, Hard Reset essentially feels like a middle ground shooter. There are attempts at weaving some Doom like elements into the game, but it also feels like it has many modern elements as well. So like I said, expectation is a Hell of a thing, but once you get past the idea it was aiming to be a mix of all three eras you get a better sense of the game and judge it a bit more fairly. You stop thinking "why aren't I playing Doom, I was promised Doom" and instead think "I'm playing Hard Reset at least, which is better than Rage anyway..."


I'm going to get this out of the way straight up - I hate Hard Reset's story and I hate "cyberpunk" through the lens of the modern shooter even more. The story might be ok, but man, it is so hard for me to not hate on it. Yes, I've read Neuromancer and other cyberpunk books, yes I've seen Bladerunner and so forth - But the elements these narratives have just doesn't resonate at all with a manshooter. Or, a botshooter, in this case. Cerebral ruminations on the spiritual cost of consumerism and how memory interacts with being human spliced between exchanges of energy powered firearms - Art done up to look like a dystopia while you destroy thousands of robots which could only be produced by a resource rich society in the first place and just ugh man please never.

Moving onto less thematic discussion - Hard Reset is, a shooter and shooters are essentially the combination of three elements interacting with each other. The guns, the troops, the battlefield. Here's where Hard Reset gets a bit loopy.

The guns and shooting feels good. It's actually such a treat and perhaps the biggest if subtle callback to Doom. Bullets go where you tell them, they don't spray all over the place. Seriously! It's a marvel of modern design, bullets go where you point! The shotgun feels like the Doom shotgun and it's weird coming to terms with that. In modern shooters a shotgun is effective about five meters ahead of you, but here the gun is actually useful at midrange. Weapons in general are satisfyingly accurate. I understand why more realism leaning shooters make range a tricky issue, but it has always been frustrating to me that fighting at range is an exercise is having the screen covered in raspberry jam while hitscan firing enemies pelt me as I struggle to connect 1 in 5 shots. I'm not saying Hard Reset doesn't have issues with a couple levels where you get pelted at great distances by enemies you can barely hit, but it's nice to feel like it's my poor marksmanship and not a game design inflicted bit of tedium.

The weapon upgrade system though, is kinda lacking. There are no less than ten weapons in Hard Reset which in and of itself is sort of an issue. Weapons fall under two categories, which it calls 'CLN' and 'NRG'. Each category is actually its own gun, with weapons actually being different settings that fire different shots. The problem? Switching time. Enemies burst out and you are punished heavily for them getting into melee range. When you switch, you take a couple seconds to change guns, then if you happened to pick the wrong mode you have to take a bit longer to transform your firearm. The end result is switching feels hampered and sloppy, which makes ten weapons feel unnecessary. The upgrade system itself is a bit of a burden, with so many guns and so little information to go on, as well as forced upgrades just to get to the guns ... It's a bit of a nuisance. On the other hand the presence of an upgrade system creates a better way to toss out a reward for "secrets" or rewards for engaging in combat, which works to the game's enjoyment.

Some of the upgrades are really fun and I think highly of the alternate fire modes. I really enjoy the x-ray feature of the rail gun (particle beam? seriously, it's a particle beam not a linear accelerator, wtf, the game even calls it a particle beam in parts) which allows you to 'wall hack' and fire on enemies through walls. But I still think there's too many of them and I'll talk about it elsewhere in a bit...

Enemy design varies immensely but is mostly kinda bad. Enemies, unfortunately, look far too much like the background you're fighting them on, meaning you can have issues picking them out quickly - Or more problematic, determining if they're dead. I also think poorly of enemies that explode, as the game punishes you far too much given the sloppy weapon switching for enemies getting in close. Boss design however is excellent, and I usually love the fights with the big charger enemies, which leads to my next topic.

One of the biggest differences between Doom and more modern shootman work (but not, again, open world games) is the sense of spatial limitation being used sparingly. In Doom, most of these tight in spots were uncommon, used as ambush points or to scare you but not really to attack you. You get the feeling the designers behind Hard Reset wanted to replicate this but didn't really think about how their enemy design would influence it. Being forced in tight isn't "scary" in Hard Reset, it's outright irritating. Enemies explode or have rapid fire, hard to dodge melee attacks. Once you get hit, your dofus makes loud grunting noises and the screen explodes in a splatter of jam. This combines to narrow down your ability to perceive what's going on - The grunting destroys audio cues and in larger fights, given the already bad enemy visual design, you can no longer tell what you're shooting at even when it's up close. Then you try to switch weapons and you can barely tell which one is which when the screen is completely clear, and then ...

Seriously though, slow weapon switching, enemies you need to dodge in melee with sprinting, a screen covered in raspberry jam and bizarreness like weapon switching being even slower during the 'bullet time' you get near death create periods of conflicting and frustrating sensory information that add up to seriously lame deaths. When you combine with this a checkpoint system that can throw you back several minutes of gameplay and frustrating, bullet sponge enemies who dodge rockets it's just ... Mediocre.

And seriously, enemies dodging rockets is pretty cute the first time you see it, but when you die to it as your last rocket sails off to nowhere you start to seriously lose interest in playing the game. I believe the principle is that enemies can dodge if you fear at their outer edges, but it's so hard to pick out where enemies are - remember, you're on the move, they look the same as the background and your screen is probably covered in red tint from taking 2% of your health in damage - that it adds up to a less than satisfactory game play experience.

Level design, barring these stupid parts, is also a mixed bag. Most of the time levels have lots of personality and the individual bits of decoration are interesting, but again I really don't care for what people evaluate cyberpunk as. The end result is a dirty grey and brown world filled with dirty looking electronics that blur together into one long dirty grey and brown fever dream for long stretches. You hit all the cliches, like train stations and nondescript factories and so forth. Lots of crates too. And boxes. Boxes and crates, all rendered in glorious dirty grey brown.

In terms of actual combat arenas, most of them are good. Though I complained above about how some of the levels narrow down too much, I don't necessarily mean it's always bad. It really depends on just how much room you're given to work with. Being jammed into a closet with a bunch of enemies you're supposed to be artfully dodging is just tedious and the screen is quickly back to jamfest. The game does this a bunch, because it wants you to use your arsenal to crowd control.

This is great! Except, like I said, switching weapons - especially for one alternate fire to stun or slow a foe - is tedious, too slow, and a barrage of button presses. Let's put it this way - Fire a rocket (LMB), switch to mortar (E), (RMB), return to fire another rocket (Q), (LMB). Should you have, gosh heavens forbid mistakenly left energy weapon set to railgun, it's LMB, E, 3, RMB, Q, LMB. That's mixed in with several keystrokes to dodge and several mouse motions to aim, of course. And an extremely slow set of animations that are hard to distinguish because most of the weapons look nearly alike. It's just dumb.

On top of all of that, even if you do manage to get the sublime combo of 2d fighter level inputs down, the game routinely input lags and fails to accept. I often find myself firing the RPG when it didn't switch to the mortar. I mean heck, it's entirely possible I misclicked, but it happens too often for that and becomes really noticeable.

There are simply too many weapons, many of which could be simplified into an alternate fire mode only, and then you could bring it down to 1-6 and have different weapons produce different alternate fire. There's also a reason games have grenades made available to players; grenades allow you to codify another small set of keystrokes into an alternate fire.

The game also features, uh, the extended edition which supposedly was a "free expansion" but more or less comes off as actually finishing an unfinished game. Truth be told, the quality level of the EE drops like a rock, with the game taking a turn for repetitive and overcrowded. You enter small arenas and fight through massive waves of enemies. At least, joy of joys, they managed to get in a painful to look at flickering industrial setting and finally! The most important of cliches! Some time in the sewers.

Still, the reason I'm complaining isn't that Hard Reset is completely terrible or even terrible at all - It's competent and charmingly solid on the most part, but the flaws begin to grate. Although you are not expected to make use of all of the weapons and their alternate fire modes, you are still laid out with controls that were built around there being way too many weapons.

Enemy design and the massive oodles of jam on your screen are the worst of it. I'm certainly not great at FPS games - It's been a long time since I'd spend 5 hours a night launching discs in Tribes - but combining the two makes it something of a serious struggle just to perceive what I'm shooting at. In many skirmishes you are expected to mark out and use environmental damage, which I think is a really cool concept and definitely a homage to Doom but when it's already hard to see things it can be easier to just cope with your enemies being bullet sponges. The other thing is you can abruptly take massive damage from the environmental crap, so often if you die to it, you just get rid of it and then ... What's the point here?

Anyway, to conclude, I think Hard Reset is an unfortunate product of poorly meshed concepts that sums into a "above average" member of the genre. There's lots of to love in the game, but the bullet sponge enemies, poor weapon set up, awful enemy visual design and overall poor visibility really hurt your enjoyment. I felt like it was incredibly difficult to dodge everything enemies threw at me, hard to keep track of which string of keystrokes I wanted to use while dodging and then hard to pick out what I was seeing once the inevitable flood of strawberries buried me at eye level for all of combat. Don't get me wrong - the levels are rich and nonlinear, and the boss design (the atlas especially) is really top notch stuff. But combat starts to feel overwhelming and a bit of a chore. The third or fourth time you're supposed to face 2 chargers + another pile of bullet sponges you just get to the point where you've fired too many rockets for one day.

It's a pity in that, I think the game would have fully charmed me if they'd cut down on the unnecessary number of weapons and reduced the jam on the screen or fletcher grunting in agony when he takes single digit splash damage. And man, make enemies stand out and I think I would have taken this as a classic. As is, it's certainly solid and absolutely worth trying out on sale, and I'm definitely picking up Flying Wild Hog's next shooter when it goes on sale.