It's the Hulk without Bruce Banner's restraint. Hard Reset is the equivalent of an extremely violent man with a hair-trigger temper. The tiny, two-legged saw blades that charge blindly at you quickly wear out their welcome, as do the large, bull-rushing automatons. In the first hour, I pretty much saw all the robot types that would be endlessly pumped out for most of the game (with a few exceptions later on), and nearly all of them follow the same behavior of jumping in my face at every opportunity, so the shooter turns into a contact sport.

Indirectly, it also adds to the idea that this is a 'hardcore' shooter by inflating the relative difficulty with repetition. Instead, Hard Reset uses checkpoint saves so it feels like I'm back on a console. There's only one way to head through each level, though there are a few secret things that encourage a little extra exploration until the invisible hand of the designer pushes you back in line.Р”Р‡or a hardcore shooter hearkening back to the old days, Hard Reset doesn't do a few things that other respected FPS titles from Doom to Half-Life 2 have wisely included, such as allowing the player to quick save whenever s/he wants to. Even squeezing around a metal post or over a lump of rubble that is no higher than your ankle is denied because of the crazy amount of linear fencing. Jumping up and shimmying across tiny, three-inch-wide ledges might work in some cases, but jumping over the railing and onto a ledge beyond it is a no-no. Getting about using WASD is as easy as hopping on top of a crate in the game, but only if you don't run into the mass of invisible walls everywhere. I usually settled on only one gun, cycled through its options, and once I burned through its ammo, switched to the other one. While it's nice for my fingertips to have all of this at their beck and call, it can be a little cumbersome to wield in the heat of Hard Reset's fast-paced carnage. The number keys, by default, are used to cycle through unlocked options, and the right mouse button has a few other options attached, depending on your weapon choice. Swapping between your gun classes is as easy as hitting the W or R key. The controls are a little rough around the edges. The same goes for the energy weapon, which can be turned from a shooter into a devastating rail gun with an X-ray vision scope. On top of that, they can be upgraded with more tricks, such as having those grenades act as mini black holes that suck in everything for your waiting rocket. The slug thrower can neatly transform into a rocket launcher, double-barreled shotgun, or grenade launcher, for example. By finding nanomachine caches that can be used to purchase upgrades, each weapon can be expanded into doing more. Both are WMD versions of Swiss army knives. Weapons are divided into two classes: a slug thrower and an energy (NRG) gun. Touchy barrels and gas cans are also left everywhere, tempting stray shots that may kill you and the enemy. An air conditioner can often be a convenient explosion of electronic death. Wild arcs of electricity block the rush of tiny robots for a few moments. Generators mounted on walls or kiosks can be blown apart for dramatic effect. The craftsmanship is also present in the depth of environmental booby-traps. It's an amazingly crafted cyber-urban wasteland twisted up with alleyways, tunnels, twisted pipes, and legions of killer robots looking to make you a part of the backdrop. The city of Bezoar has ads that bark at you with an intentionally badly synthesized voice the glowing neon lights of closed storefronts and the hovering Blade Runner-esque propaganda blimps seem out of place in a simple shooter. The artists of Flying Wild Hog have taken Hard Reset's engine and have molded something beautiful out of the scarred metal and cybernetic mishmash of limbs. Though the story is largely forgettable, the scenery isn't. The main hero also has a habit of dropping f-bombs so often that you could probably make a drinking game out of it. You're basically there to kill lots robots and help save the last of humanity. It's mostly incomprehensible, though there's something about rampant AI, internal AI, and then something about rebels. Hard Reset's story is told in between levels using comic-book speech bubbles and stark, hand-drawn sketches dramatically drifting across the screen.

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