[PAX East 2016] Hard Reset Redux Preview

Hard Reset Redux is a remastering and console release of the 2011’s Hard Reset from developer Flying Wild Hog. While the game that’s being remade is from just a few years ago, the demo of Redux I played at PAX East felt more like it was from 2002.

That’s not a knock against it or a judgment of the graphical and technical upgrades. Redux is very purposefully a throwback to a specific kind of shooter of the last years of the 90’s and early 00’s. Games like Quake and Serious Sam that had more in common with earlier classics like Doom than their Call of Duty and Half-Life contemporaries. The kind of shooters where there wasn’t much of a story, enemies didn’t hide behind cover or behave realistically, and you didn’t care. They charged at you down a hallway and you barreled your way towards with all kinds of ridiculous weaponry as fast as possible.

Redux brings the graphics a little more up to modern par, enhances some load times, tweaks the difficulty and adds a few new modest features, but that core classic style is still there. The big difference from its forebears, which reveled in extensive arsenals of goofy and implausible weaponry, is you only have two guns, sort of. You get a ballistic-based rifle and a plasma gun. However, they’re both basically Swiss Army knife-guns. The ballistic-gun can rearrange itself into a traditional machine gun or shotgun, as well as a rocket, grenade or proximity mine launchers. The plasma cannon can shoot your run-of-the-mill plasma balls, or you can fire a continuous stream of arcs of electricity, a blob of energy that detonates and entangles enemies, slowing them down, the classic pixel-accurate railgun, and lastly the smart gun that floats through walls while homing in on enemies.

 

I had everything unlocked during the demo and, other than for the sake of variety, I didn’t feel much need to switch between weapons. The shotgun might have made it a little easier to deal with the smaller swarms of enemies, but aside from that I was able to blast everything without much thought. It was quick, breezy fun speeding my way through the ruins of the cyberpunk cityscape, but I’m not sure if it would hold my interest for more than an hour or so.

To be fair, Redux, does mix it up a little bit if you played the original. In addition to the more technical upgrades, Redux also adds a new “cyber-katana” weapon and a forward dash move. How much that might entice you to play this if you already went through the original, I can’t say, but they were neat on their own.

 

Developer Flying Wild Hog was also responsible for the 2013 remake of Shadow Warrior and its forthcoming sequel, so they’ve got a handle of the retro-remake at this point. I wasn’t especially thrilled with Redux, but if the games it takes inspiration from were more your thing back in the day or if you’re sick of the more scripted and planned modern shooters, it might be worth taking a look at.

Hard Reset Redux will launch for PC, Xbox One and PS4 and include all the content from the Exile expansion at a currently unannounced date.