Behind the fate of Hard Reset (into Russian, we translated as a “cold reboot”) in “Gambling” we watched very carefully. The game was made by the Polish team Flying Wild Hog – the studio, although young, but consisting of people who have already managed to speak talentedly in the junior genre. From the creators of Painkiller and Bulletstorm – and to a slightly lesser extent from the authors of Sniper: Ghost Warrior – it was quite possible to expect an excellent game. In a few videos, we were shown as the main character armed with an energy drin, a rustle among the crowds of metal creatures leads to a rustle. The beasts united in a pack, went from the rear, painfully poked into the character with steel false knuckles, and in the final they scattered into thousands of brilliant pieces.
The developers in the first interview, which we took from them in the summer, explained that it is better not to wait for genre revelations, because they still do not Bulletstorm, but rather Painkiller. Therefore, the main question that excited us is how interesting it will be to shoot at the presumptuous pieces of iron.
Cars went to the Maidan
The plot in games of this kind is not very important: the attention of the player is focused on fights. The developers sometimes even conduct an experiment on addictiveness: if the beta tester begins to think for what moves from point A to point B, it means that the fighting must be redone.
[[Bullet]] installation for modification of weapons and equipment. You will have to look here often.
Hard Reset does not bother with cunning stories, but it becomes clear from the entourage and from comic book inserts between the missions that the case unfolds in the future. Machines saddled humanity and are already being selected to the last stronghold of civilization – the city. At some point, the pieces of iron manage to break through the perimeter in one of the sectors. The obscene fighter, Major Flartcher, is immediately sent to the fight against the furious Valley. If you set the goal, in the plot of Hard Reset you can see a huge number of references – here is the “matrix” and Deus ex, and “I, the robot”, there are references to “Johnny Mnemonika”, and people with a rich fantasy will find a connection even with “Neuromantian »William Gibson.
But all these vicissitudes with nanites, blinds of consciousness, implants and other cyberpancomes are pushed into the background and make themselves felt only occasionally. The rest of the time, the Flatcher is busy with affairs much more urgent – for example, how to survive in a fight with two dozens of angry chainsaws on chicken legs. Or, let's say, how to quickly jump onto the garbage tank so that the enraged steel egg is pulled right under the feet.
Steel Cheburechnaya
Local cybernetic vivarium does not leave time for thoughts about the eternal. At first, robots are attacked in small flocks, but after a couple of levels their stream begins to resemble the migration of lemmings. If twenty to thirty hybrids of the lawn mower, microwave and mixer does not jump out of the next corridor on you, it is worth rebooting the game-perhaps the trigger did not work.
[[Bullet]] firearms are in no way inferior to the energy. There is an incentive to pump both branches only at a high level of complexity – there is a corny lack of cartridges there.
Through perfectly linear levels, you have to literally wire under the rumble of a machine gun, explosions of missiles, howls of plasma and thunderous discharges of the electric shocker. The blood and flesh of any meat shooter – shooting and control – are made in Hard Reset excellent. If you are firing from a shotgun, then you literally feel a return. If you sit out of the machine, feel how each turn makes a gap in the rows of the enemy.
The developers studied the erogenous zones of the average player well. Before each attack we include anxious, easily memorable music: it seems that there is no one around, but there are only a couple of familiar chords, and the adrenal glands are already regularly pumped into the blood adrenaline, and the fingers frantically switch to the gun more powerful. A couple of seconds passes, a crowd of monsters falls out of the corner, and another furious fight begins. The weapon rumbles, robots are spinning, armor scatters into dust – everyone is happy.
I'm a monster, I and the bull
In half an hour of gameplay, the main problems are indicated. The main one is a disgrace, disregard for level design. Remember any fight from Bulletstorm, Painkiller or Serious sam : Each battle, despite the fleeting, resembled a small tactical operation. A crowd of wild opponents jumped out at you. So you retreated behind a stone wall into the corridor. Here the crowd stuck in a narrow arch and was shot at point blank range. Here you are hiding behind the boxes so successfully located right in the center of the room, jump on some stacks of the boards and beat the enemy from the top.
[[Bullet]] intermediate superboss. Destroyed to banal simply.
The design of each level, each arena is so thought out that they simply did not pay attention to it. The space is modeled so that it is as convenient as possible to advance and defend, find shelter for reloading and hiding from enemy snipers.
In Hard Reset, everything is different. Design here again pushes the player sticks into the wheels. You can lower a whole brood of creatures on you and not at all give space for maneuver. If you confront any cybernetic shelupon like a chainsaw on legs, you can still put up with this. But when several heavyweights are pounced on the hero, the situation becomes critical. You are trying to bounce, come from the rear, make some more maneuver, but constantly stumble upon the boxes, get confused in narrow aisles and you can’t always climb higher, although, it would seem, everything has everything for this.
Feelings at this moment arise about the same as the Toreador, who went to battle and unexpectedly discovered that the site that has to be dancing with a bull is only two by two meters. Nowhere to go, half of the Ringa is busy with angry carcasses.
[[Bullet]] Sometimes we are shown amazing angles in the spirit of the "Running Blade". Unfortunately, the remaining 99% of the time the game looks dark and inconspicuous.
The funny thing is that during the battles with the bosses the situation changes to the diametrically opposite. For some reason, Hard Reset designers believe that the best way to cope with a giant monster is to run around him for a long time in an absolutely even field and shoot, shoot, shoot … All this is doubly surprising if you remember that almost all the bosses were killed differently , for everyone it was necessary to choose their own key, spending a lot of time on it.
Evolution of species
And this is the second serious problem Hard Reset. The game does not make the slightest attempt to at least somehow strain the player's brain. The developers seemed to perceive the name of the “spinal shooter” literally. And completely forgot that people enjoy not only from timely pressing the button, but also from solving logical problems, let not even very difficult.
[[Bullet]] inserts-comics is not the best way to submit the plot for the shooter. In the Hard Reset, the narrative thread is lost very quickly.
In linear shooters, logic is usually built on the choice of weapons for each enemy and on a certain manner of behavior with each enemy. The task of the gaming designer is to tie the weapons and enemies in the mind of the player so that he has a reflex for each enemy. And as is known from the course of physiology – timely and correct operation of reflexes makes the brain produce endorphins, hormones of happiness.
In Hard Reset, our reflexes are idle. On the one hand, the weapon here was erected to the cult. You need to take care of him and constantly improve. Flatcher knows how to use two categories of trunks – simple firearms and neuroelectronic. Each has its own pumping branch. Collecting hinges scattered in terms, we accumulate energy for upgrades, and then in special devices we choose which improvement to unlock. Theoretically, if you rummage all levels and find all the secrets, you can pump everything to the final credits. In practice, nanites are constantly not enough.
[[Bullet]] Sweet Dream Greenpisis – genocide of revived chainsaws.
The developers clearly assumed that players would be worn with a pumping system as a written store. Carefully choose which upgrade to make, what to spend precious nanits next time. But here's the bad luck. There is no serious difference between guns. Almost the enemies do not care what you came on a date – with a https://candy-land-casino.co.uk/ quick -firing machine gun, rocket launcher or plasmagan. In any case, they will be happy and will die together after several shots. The only reason to pump both branches of weapons is the lack of cartridges at a high level of complexity: it is unpleasant to spend all the lead, switch to plasma and find that it is not suitable for anything at all. At the average level, it is quite enough to pump one or two barrels and safely live with them until the very end of the game, spending precious nanits only on the upgrade of protection, medical care and ammunition.
The corpse of the director
The third global defect of the game is the lack of competent directing. There may not be a normal plot in the “meat” shooter, it can do without subtext, but it should have memorable events, bright moments, beautiful and logical transitions between the scenes. And most importantly – the shooter should surprise the player. Remember BulletStorm. For some hour, it was possible to ride a train in it, shoot from a helicopter, drive an electronic tyrannosaurus and even destroy a giant dam.
Hard Reset only occasionally demonstrates some huge steel colossus and carefully hints that in the near future we have to fight with her (by the way, we have to fight only twice). The rest of the time on us over and over again, for and without a reason, they produce a horde of steel idols and in their own way they ask to deal with it.
One way to check whether the game is well or poorly directed is to watch a few gameplay rollers and try to determine which part of the game they were filmed. In Hard Reset, it is extremely difficult to cope with this task. Entourage, layout of levels, intensity of battles, and even monsters practically do not change. Shots from the start of the game, its middle and finals look almost the same.
It is worth calculating the mistakes made by the developers, and it begins to seem that nothing good could come out of the Hard Reset. When a street magician puts a rusty razor blade in his mouth, several beads, an aluminum ring and a torn thread, at first it also seems that nothing will come of it. And then – voila! – on the mouth, a design is shown in which the contours of the star or even the Eiffel Tower are guessed.
Hard Reset, with the inferiority of most constituent elements, also manages to develop in a good, in general, game. And explaining it is logically very difficult. If you go from the irrational, then there is an explanation. There is a theory according to which a bad game ceases to be bad if most of the elements in it are made at an equally low -quality level and there is one important element made well. In this case, this key element focuses on itself, and low -quality simply does not interfere with playing. The theory is strange, but the hard reset fits into it the best possible: it is interesting to shoot here, and everything else, as they say, does not shine. The main thing, sitting down for the game, do not forget that Hard Reset is not even close to Painkiller and even more so not BulletStorm.
TRANSLATION. There are practically no complaints about the localization. Everything was translated – from voice to neon inscriptions. Fonts are selected with high quality, stylistic blunders are also a minimum. Only kills a measured, absolutely calm, well -set voice, often sounding in critical situations, in which people usually abruptly yell, and not recite. But the same, alas, sin.
Reigracy:
Cool plot:
Originality:
Easy to master:
Gameplay:
6
Graphics:
7
Sound and music:
8
Interface and management:
9
Waited?
Not the most successful, but not the most hopeless attempt to encroach on the laurels Painkiller and Serious Sam.
Mania rating: 6.0
"Above the average"