I love cyberpunk narratives. Maybe it’s just a general acceptance that our robot overlords will eventually take control and suppress human life, or maybe it’s just cool to see someone plug a wire into their head. Regardless, Hard Reset Redux presents that dystopian future I like so much, but in perhaps the blandest way possible. Lacking creativity in even its plot, Hard Reset wanders through the same settings for far too long and only ever gets exciting when it throws a new weapon your way.
The cyberpunk story that this game tries to tell is one of AI rising up and taking control of a city – Bezoar. Machines are taking over the city and it is up to Major Fletcher to stop them from overtaking Bezoar. However, not everything is as it seems and there may be more for Fletcher to worry about than he initially thought. The unfortunate thing is, you play as a sheep. I don’t mean a literal sheep, but a guy who just follows orders and his only defining trait is that he likes to swear and drink (two things which never really have any impact on anything). He is cannon fodder, dressed up as an action hero. The game tries to briefly explore this fact, but only scratches the surface by having him realize that there is more than he’s being told. It never really goes beyond that.
You cannot do this in an action game. Not unless there is a payoff. This is such a huge issue for Hard Reset Redux because it is never able to transcend its by-the-numbers story or bland environments. There is a lot that can be destroyed in environments but that’s because it feels like they never changed the template and just kept making the same areas with the same destructible pieces. Eventually you discover some other areas that tie well into the game’s narrative of humanity’s fight, but they fail to be interesting since most of the enemies are the exact same.
Even the puzzles that are in the game all follow the exact same approach, causing them to be uninteresting. Is a door locked and you can’t use the keypad? Just follow the bright, pulsating wire that leads to something for you to blow up or turn on/off. This puzzle is basically the only puzzle in the game, leaving Hard Reset Redux with an issue of repetition and uninspired design throughout.
I will say that there is a difficulty to the fights, though. Battles consist of moving around a lot and constantly switching weapons to decimate the machines. There are a decent amount of things to select, and I didn’t even unlock everything in my first playthrough. One of the additions to Redux is a forged katana that I did use on occasion, but found getting up close to enemies was almost always a bad idea. I spent most of my time switching between a rocket launcher, shotgun, and mortar. These were far more effective when going against large bosses, and sometimes they would require you to use specific weapons in order to get an advantage. The scale of the bosses is something to marvel at, but they are very few and far between.
The interesting thing is how the game makes players use multiple types of weapons. Weapons will share ammo with other weapons because there are only two types of ammo available. For example, the secondary fire on a shotgun might take up more ammo than the regular discharge of a shotgun blast, but a rocket will almost always use more ammo. If you run out of traditional weaponry, there are the energy-based weapons like the plasma gun and mortar that also share an ammo type, but different from the more shell and bullet-oriented weapons. You’ll find yourself picking up ammo at a rapid pace, but there will be some fights where it requires using more than just one type of gun.
The benefit of using multiple weapons and switching between them at a more frequent pace is that the destruction goes off the rails. If it can blow up, it will. Those destructible environments mentioned earlier become huge contributions to the spectacle of Hard Reset Redux. It’s just unfortunate that the game’s framerate dips on a regular basis when a lot of things are happening at once. It’s not that bad, but when the game is running at a really smooth framerate and then starts dipping, you notice it. There’s also the issue of the game simply stopping completely when loading into a new area. It might be the same chapter, but there are issues where you can tell the game has segmented itself. I only found this disappointing because the game can sometimes have a nice pacing to it that abruptly ends.
It’s hard for me to recommend Hard Reset Redux when there are many shooters on the market that do what it does, but far better. It feels like you’re playing Doom or Serious Sam at times, but with a cyberpunk aesthetic. That sounds neat, but the game’s aesthetic wears thin very quickly, leaving you with a pretty bland gameplay experience that rarely feels anywhere near as exciting as its story suggests. This is a very boring title that only barely manages to attain any fun.
A PS4 review copy of Hard Reset Redux was provided by Flying Wild Hog for the purpose of this review