Hard Reset Extended Edition

This game makes me physically ill. Even after putting the field of view to 90 I get nausea and a headache. The fish eye effect and the screen shake just kill me. My rating for sensitive gamers 0/10, definitly not recommended and removed from library.

Hard Reset is basically: kill ♥♥♥♥, get better weapons, kill more ♥♥♥♥, and occasionally question why the enemy designers hate you. It's another one of those DOOM-style FPS games where the objective is refreshingly simple: run around, shoot everything that moves, collect better weapons and gear, and try not to get blown up by the enemies that apparently have no concept of self-preservation. Speaking of which, the kamikaze enemies are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hilarious. They see you and immediately decide that their life's purpose is to sprint directly into you and explode. No strategy. No fear. Just pure dedication. And then there's the dude who is legitimately a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tank with a mortar. Because apparently regular enemies weren't enough. Someone looked at a tank, gave it legs, handed it a mortar, and said "yeah, put that in the game." The gameplay is straightforward, the shooting feels good, the weapons are fun, and there's enough upgrading and progression to keep things moving. It's nothing revolutionary, but honestly? I don't give a ♥♥♥♥. Sometimes you don't need an elaborate story, 14 different skill trees, or a 90-hour open world. Sometimes you just need to shoot robots in the face. …

Wow, the moment I shot the first AC unit and it shortcircuited in a rain of electricity before exploding in flames, scattering debris across the street, I knew this was made by the same company that made Shadow Warrior. This time the setting is cyberpunk and you are fighting robots so there is no gory goodness and bloodshed, but even still the game managed to surprise me with the progressive dismandling of the bigger units. I love the devs' attention to detail, like how you start fighting a pristine looking robot and as the fight progresses its panels get torn off and its inner mechanisms become exposed so you can either shoot at its core for maximum destruction, or the leg joints, in which case the robot's lower half gets blown and it start trying to crawl on the ground in an attempt to claw at you. And of course the star of the game is enviromental destruction and mayhem and I can't get enough of it. The store signs hanging above get torn and fall down, shooting at lamps make them malfunction and slowly fade forever, cardboard gets torn to shred, pallets are broken to wooden planks, computer screens start malfuctioning at first, then get torn off from their stands and go blank…

It's a good shooter, underrated. I think the exile levels kinda suck and so do some of the weapons. I grew to like Fletcher and Novak, but when the story gets interesting the game is over. Wild Hog should come back to this universe, its ripe for more mutant robot freak destruction.

I'll quote that one guy from the Chernobyl mini show, "not great, not terrible". That quote applies to this game. Just get the redux version of this game unless you are an achievement hunter then get this one. This game has 115 achievements same as the redux version. So I guess that's one benefit that makes this worth it. The graphics are fine. There is a variety of guns to use. You get to shoot stuff. However the story seems to be a little to basic to me but that's just me. That is why I say not great, not terrible. This is a middle ground game. Fine playing it once but never coming back to it again after I'm finished with it.

The gun variety is great and I do love the cyberpunk aesthetic. The level design, though, is deeply annoying in that you likely could skip half of all the levels if your character, who's supposed to be a badass cyborg soldier, wasn't as flexible as a boulder and was capable of crouching or doing a pull up to clamber onto ledges, instead of forcing you to go around by insanely long routes in EVERY LEVEL. Aside from that, if you like shooting a lot of robots the game's fine.