>Hard Reset: First Impressions
>Hard Reset drops on Tuesday, the 13th, but the demo is out now on Steam. I streamed it live last night and that’s good news for anyone thinking they may have performance issues. It was running fine on my end with medium settings while streaming and vsync was on. I run a Radeon 5770 and an Phenom II 965.
The demo is only the first maybe 10-15 minutes of a level, but shows you a lot of the game basics in that time. The first thing you notice is the cyberpunk ambiance is in full effect. Futuristic cars line the streets, power grids light up around you and robot junk is everywhere. There is great art in this game. Best of all, the brand new engine has a responsive feel; movement and gun play are not clunky at all. With full graphics, which I wasn’t using, it will look incredible.
I played on normal difficulty and had seen some of the game before so I wasn’t overly challenged. However, this game will be very hard on the Hard and Insane difficulties. I used a ton of ammo on normal, but you have the advantage of the environment to help with the hordes of little robots. Using everything around you to your advantage is important in this game. There are numerous electric power stations around as well as cars to blow up. Luring enemies to these to fry or blow them up is key. I’d imagine on Hard or Insane there are less power stations and less ammo, both of which present a huge problem. The big robots took a lot to kill.
The level design is sort of linear, at least in the demo but the puzzle aspect is there from old school games. Find a switch here to open a door there, cut the power to turn off a force field. Very familiar to veterans of the PC FPS genre. There are no quick saves in this game, only checkpoints, meaning you can’t save yourself with a quick save, adding to the difficulty.
Finally, something they barely touched on in the demo were the upgrades. You can buy attachments and new weapons with credits you pick up in the world. These are hidden all over and collected from fallen enemies. This adds a sort of Borderlands element to the weaponry.
Overall, in the demo I was very impressed. The game is only $26.99 for pre-orders and $29.99 after that. A must buy in my opinion, especially for the price.
