Hard Reset Redux Review

Hard Reset Redux Review

Price: £14.99
Developer: Flying Wild Hog
Publisher: Devolver
Platform: PC, Xbox One, PS4
Version tested: PC

Hard Reset was never a particularly complicated game. Hard Reset Redux, the remaster of the game from the original developers, Flying Wild Hog, also prefers to keep it simple.

Hard Reset Redux feels like a game out of time, coming from an era of classic "hardcore" FPS titles. Hard Reset itself launched all the way back in 2011, but it was aping titles like Painkiller and Black, all the way back from the early 2000s. The immediate problem after a few hours spent with Hard Reset Redux isn't the game itself, which I've enjoyed in spite of some faults, but that it's 2016 now. Our expectations as gamers have changed.

It's still a lot of fun; the game starts and immediately sends a bunch of robots at you, adorned with saw blades, spikes and other sharp metal implements. They can rend you limb from limb. The only answer? To blast them with one of your two weapons; a machine gun or a machine gun (that fires blue electricity orbs).

The first few gunfights are particularly pleasing. Pretty much everything in this game is destructible, either going up in a vicious explosion or imploding in arcs of electricity, both of which serve to thin out the herd in the most visually impressive way possible.


Play starts to take on a familiar rhythm: you enter an area, you get assailed by a swarm of robots with a variety of killing implements, then you circle strafe about the place hosing people with your collection of robot-destroying guns.

Your arsenal has pretty much everything you might expect: RPG's, proximity mines, shotguns, that weird electric beam weapon lots of shooters used to have, and even a railgun. The familiarity of the weapons is comforting and, when you find something you like, there are a selection of upgrades for each weapon to make it more effective. I tended towards the assault rifle and shotgun early on, but in later levels most of the fun comes from switching up your weaponry and trying to get groups of enemies gathered around the multiple things that might explode nearby.


It's solid fun, but design wise it just feels like something we've all played before. It's not helped by movement feeling a tiny bit sluggish and while you can jump, it's not high enough to feel empowering, and you'll struggle to make it over stuff. The Redux adds a short speed boost/dash to your arsenal and gives you a bit of scope for repositioning yourself, but it still doesn't quite work.

It's a fair comment on the visual front, too. The upgrade means it looks a whole bunch better than the original 2011 release, but it's still very muted. Colours are washed out and the bleak dystopian tone works for a game so obviously inspired by the works of Gibson and Stephenson. Unfortunately, it's a bit samey to look at, almost like Deus Ex but with a colour palette of smeared browns, blues and greys.