game looks really interesting. I like the sound of it

well can't say it doesn't look appealing ^^. That said, I do hope they keep the similarities to doom and quake to the open level editor =) that would definitely make it worth a purchase. Imagine PC FPS where users can create their own maps!! oh the revolution! (the re would take its true meaning here ^^).

I like how it sounds, how it looks, and I like the premise. If it is good, maybe it can be my segway from the awesomeness that (I hope) is Deus Ex and into the reality that is the gaming scene now (almost completely and utterly shitty).

Hard Reset is a visually striking FPS that pits the player against waves of vicious robots, with emphasis on the vicious. It comes hot out of Poland from folks who had previously worked on The Witcher andBulletstorm, and it'll kill your face dead.

Destructoid got some hands-on time with the game ahead of its release later this year, and now you get to read about it!

Hard Reset (PC)
Developer: The Flying Wild Hog
Publisher: The Flying Wild Hog
To be released: September, 2011

In an age of gritty military shooters, regenerating health, and cover-based combat, it's always refreshing to see a game that sticks to the FPS genre's old-school roots, and Hard Reset is unapologetic in its commitment to the nostalgic. This is a game with the classics in mind, evoking the days when all you needed was a gun, some enemies, and perhaps another gun.

Hard Reset pits the human player against a horde of robots that have gone bezerk in a cyberpunk world that bears more than a passing resemblance to Blade Runner. These robots come in waves and are intensely aggressive, hurling bullets and bodies at the player from all angles. Fans of Painkiller will instantly feel at home with Hard Reset, where the main aim is to walk for a bit, shoot a load of things, walk some more, then shoot again. Aside from a few instances where one has to press switches or destroy power generators, the focus is purely on violent, fast-paced combat.

With contextual commands and an oppressive atmosphere, Hard Reset also takes quite a bit of inspiration from DOOM 3. You'll interact with computer terminals automatically, your target reticule becoming a more traditional mouse pointer when you approach interactive screens, and there are plenty of tight corridors with robot opponents ready to jump at you. 

The fundamentals are in place for a great wave-based shooter, and there's plenty of style, but I do have a few concerns that I hope get addressed before release. First and foremost, the "look" sensitivity is very temperamental and requires a lot of tinkering. It feels sticky, and I noticed that upping the sensitivity level didn't help. The game gets caught between being too sluggish and too twitchy with no happy medium. It's something that one can get used to, but it could definitely be better.

The player character moves a bit too slowly for such a fast-paced game. Most enemy projectiles cannot be avoided, and charging enemies are very hard to dodge. There is a sprint action, but it lasts for a very short time and takes too long to recharge. The player needs a level of agility more on par with the enemies in order for fights to feel fair.

A little extra help in this area would be welcome, as Hard Reset is not afraid to throw everything it has at the player. Fights are intense, tough, and pretty damn exhilarating. A few enemies are annoying, like the rolling bombs, but winning pitched battles against increasingly angry robots feels damn rewarding.

There are two main weapons at the player's disposal: one that dishes out standard ammunition, and another that fires energy projectiles. At first, these weapons are only kitted out for assault rifle and plasma rifle rounds, respectively, but they can be augmented to transform into different weapons. The assault rifle can become a shotgun, grenade launcher, or rocket launcher, while the energy weapon can shoot lightning or explosive energy beams once upgraded. Each augmentation can be further upgraded by spending points uncovered throughout levels, in order to improve stats such as fire rate or explosive radius. It's a cool system, although I found that several weapons were quite inefficient, usually suffering from fire rates that weren't fast enough to handle the robotic onslaught. 

This problem of speed and sensitivity is perhaps the only thing holding Hard Reset back. It's a gorgeous-looking game with a great visual design, challenging wave-based gameplay, and an honest, old-fashioned sensibility that helps set it apart from modern shooters. I have incredibly high hopes for the game, and even moreso after learning that it's focusing purely on a single-player experience. It's clear that these guys want to take the FPS genre back to its roots with Hard Reset, and I am excited to see just how good a job it does when the full product is ready.

We definitely need more games like this on the market, that's for damn sure.

http://www.destructoid.com/preview-hard-reset-207845.phtml

Hard Reset seemed to appear from nowhere. First a screenshot. Then a name and a video. Then a pile of screenshots. That started barely a month ago, with the game due out as soon as September. And then yesterday we found a few levels of the game arrive in our inbox. So I’ve had a play of this PC-only shooter. (The screenshots aren’t ours, as the code was watermarked, but those below are all new, and you can click on them for bigger versions.)

Flying Wild Hog, the best-of-Polish development team behind today’s treat, have been selling Hard Reset as an old-school PC shooter, and in many ways that’s true. In other ways, it really isn’t. Where it falls between the two is an interesting place, full of promise, but with elements I beg the developers to fix before release.

The story, told in comicky-book cutscenes, is about something called the Sanctuary, millions of human lives, defending it from the machines, doesn’t this sound a bit like the Matrix, shouty men, and so on. Which is essentially the words people say in between bouts of your shooting at things. An old-school shooter’s story should be ignored in favour of shooting at things, and so here I give it a tick. I then draw a smiley face next to the line at the end of one of the cutscenes where your shouty-man character shouts, “Time to blow shit up!”

That’s mostly what Hard Reset is about. Having some weapons, and shooting at the enemies. Also, shooting at the scenery to make stuff blow up to destroy the enemies. And it’s no more sophisticated than that. Another tick.

Things get even more ticktastic when the very neatly used in-game tutorial tips (presented alongside the game’s in-game narrative nonsense, context sensitive, and not enforced – tickticktick) introduce you to the concept of looking for secrets. The great forgotten feature of classic shootering are present and correct, either offering you bonuses for exploring off track, or having cracks in walls that can be widened by exploding nearby barrels, cars, etc. These bonuses are presented in the form of madly glowing giant awkwardly shaped boxes of ammo (tick), health (tick) and XP (waitwhat?).

XP is the game’s perhaps first serious deviation from 90s shooters. As you kill things you gain it in drips, as well as gathering larger lumps from the pickups. This can then be spent at upgrade stations, letting you elaborately adapt your two main weapons, as well as improve your armour and health. Those two weapons, by the way, begin as a standard bullet-firing machine gun, and an electricity-firing plasma gun. Each can eventually be upgraded until it shifts, Transformers style, into many alts. So your machine gun becomes a shotgun, a rocket launcher, grenade launcher, and so on. The plasma orb doodah can fire arcing electricity, balls of fizzing lightning, giant electric domes, and hefty beams. Then these modes each have improvements and alt-fires, and so on and so on, meaning that just two guns are in fact an enormous arsenal.

Enemies, as I said, are machines, of many different types, and there are immediately far more of them than you’ll think reasonable. Like Serious Sam, Hard Reset is a game best played while running backward, which is an ultro-tick. However, flipping crikey these demo levels got hard. Being swarmed by bombs on legs, all exploding on you at once whether you shoot at them or not is, at the moment, a touch frustrating. There are ways to get past it using different weapons, but, well, here we come to the first of my major gripes…

The two changing weapons thing is a great idea. One is assigned to Q, the other E, and then the varying modes on your mousewheel or the number keys. The massive issue is, in the version I played there’s no useful way to know which mode is which. The gun changes shape, but not in a distinctive way, and the little symbols that appear in the bottom left of the HUD are utterly meaningless. This version of the game generously unlocks lots of the modes of the guns midway through, so as to give the previewer an opportunity to use everything despite not having the full game. And it quickly becomes apparent that trying to remember the order in which the different modes of two weapons are in, with no useful visual feedback, is a real pain in the arse. It lead to my blowing myself up with bombs, or firing useless electricity at giant mechs.

This becomes more problematic when combined with another cross next to its old-school values: no quicksave. Clearly the argument tediously rages on about whether games should quicksave or checkpoint, but there’s no debate that when the latter is chosen, they have to be done really bloody well. Currently, and there is plenty of time for this to be fixed, Hard Reset’s aren’t. Being killed from behind four rooms (and thus four major waves of enemies) into a level sees you put right back to the start, which is not okay. I’d far rather see a quicksave put in, since that’s how super-tough shooters always used to play, and would escape the need for the team to dramatically fix its checkpointing.

And while I’m listing things I’d love to see tweaked so as this astonishingly gorgeous shooter can be everything I’d like it to be, the damage feedback is currently all over the place. Using the rather more modern technique of reddening the edges of the screen to show you’re taking damage, the intensity of this in no way matches the damage taken. You can be presented as being at death’s door with 90% of your health, or on other occasions suddenly drop dead without warning. It definitely needs tidying up, especially in a game that’s so focused on being difficult.

Talking of being difficult, a rather weird feature, and one I can’t immediately understand, is the way difficulty levels work. The usual are available, Easy, Normal, Difficult and Insane. I picked Normal, as is only appropriate. Later in the few levels we were sent I found myself being utterly trounced. No bad thing – being difficult is another important tick. But I wanted to get past it to be able to write this for you, so switched down to Easy for a spell. Except, it was to be for the rest of the game. Changing difficulty in-game will only let you make it easier, not harder, and then when you select that change it warns you that you can’t undo it. It meant that as I went on to finish the portion of game, including the big boss, it was all rather too easy, and there was nothing I could do about it. A very peculiar thing, and I cannot immediately think of a good reason for it to exist.

The reason I bring these things up in a preview (usually a more neutral territory as it’s unfair to judge something that’s unfinished) is because I really desperately want this game to be good. The graphics, as the video and screenshots will have shown you, are astonishing. It runs incredibly smoothly for so much elaborate detail, and copes well with a dozen enemies on screen at once. Such fidelity, combined with 1990s shooter values, desperately running backward as you avoid the onslaught, is exactly what I’m missing from my gaming at the moment. Just being in a shooter that wasn’t trying to teach me a valuable life lesson while asking me to solve Fermat’s last theorem using planks and physics was a rare joy. My shoulders relaxed slightly as I realised I was being allowed to have fun without consequences. That’s something well worth fighting for, so I really do beg Flying Wild Hog to reconsider their use of checkpoints, and to rethink their feedback for which weapon is selected. Tweak that, and we’re really onto something here.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/08/04/hands-on-hard-reset/#more-68455

This is hilarious. The moment he said XP I immediately thought "hold on that's not rigth" before I saw his "wait what?"

Otherwise I am truly glad to hear everything about this, minus the XP. I do wonder how he can mention Serious Sam, and still bitch about enemies who blow up whether he shoots them or not. I don't think he has played SS if he just said that. I like that there's guns and you aren't some pussy super soldier who can only hold 2 or 3 (lawl). I also like that you aren't some pussy solder who needs regenerating health (lawlx2). I do NOT like check points though.

For many, there's been something missing from gaming - especially first-person-shooters - for a while now. Flying Wild Hog want you to know that they hear you, and are hoping to do something about it. They also want you to know that you're likely to die a horrible, metal-induced death if you play their new game Hard Reset. We talked to Co-founder and Programmer Klaudiusz Zych to find out why:

Strategy Informer: So, you mentioned how you wanted to wait before announced as you didn't like the hyper period - but do you think two months is enough time to get the word out about your game? These hype periods are there for a reason, after all. 

Klaudiusz Zych: Yes, but are they there for a good reason? Movie campaigns usually last for 2-3 months before premiere. If it lasted for a year or years, as in the games industry, costs would be through the roof. 

Players’ interest drops soon after releasing some new material. So the choice is either to show new material constantly over the course of a year or two – but this way the game gets spoiled and you soon run out of new content – or the same content is showed over and over again. 

Strategy Informer: Do you have any plans for a closed or open beta? Will there be a demo before launch? 

Klaudiusz Zych: I can’t imagine that we wouldn’t do a demo of Hard Reset. For several reasons. It’s an old-school game, and in the old times, games had demos. Action-packed first-person shooters are the best fit for a demo; you don’t have to introduce story for a couple of hours, and the game mechanics don’t need to be learned for three hours. You just sit down and beat the crap out of the bad guys. Those are the mechanics. So yes, there will be a demo close to the game’s release in September. 

Strategy Informer: You've mentioned how Hard Reset is more like Doom than anything that exists today. Do you think there's a reason game design like that kind of die-out? Or did it just get over-shadowed by the more popularised Hollywood-esque style of shooter? 

Klaudiusz Zych: I think that kind of design got overshadowed by console-esque style of gameplay. First-person shooters on consoles must be playable (and fun) with controllers and not keyboard and mouse. That requires different kinds of gameplay mechanics: cover system, regenerating health, auto-aim, etc. Console first-person shooters can’t be based on old-school skills, because they could become frustrating for more casual audiences. 

Strategy Informer: Given the name of your game, and how you mention people may be becoming bored with 'on-the-rail' shooters... we can't help but feel there's a hidden message here. Do you think the genre as a whole needs a 'Hard' reset? 

Klaudiusz Zych: You said it, man .

Strategy Informer: Are you worried about the competition that Battlefield and Call of Duty is going to present? Whether your game is like them or not thematically, or even in terms of gameplay, the average consumer is going to see three shooter-type games, and may only have enough money for one of them.

Klaudiusz Zych: Hard Reset tries to be something different from Battlefield or Call of Duty. It’s not a kind of interactive movie experience; it’s just a jump-in-and-have-fun experience. And we are coming a month before them. So, yes, we are concerned, but happy at the same time. Because we are not alone and competition is good, for us and for the players. 

Strategy Informer: You've made it clear your reasons for wanting to go PC-only for release. If you ever were to think about porting your game to the console, or making a new game that included consoles, would you want to develop that in-house or would you out-source it to someone who had more skill in the console space? 

Klaudiusz Zych: We are not planning to port Hard Reset to consoles. But if we do a new game with different kind of gameplay that better suits consoles, we would do it in-house. Hard Reset’s focus was on extremely high-quality graphics and a highly optimized engine that would handle it in at least 30fps on even low-end machines. We can’t give it away to someone else and risk compromises on graphics quality or frame rate. 

Strategy Informer: How important are digital platforms going to be in getting the game into the hands of players? Will you even bother with traditional retail? 

Klaudiusz Zych: I believe that digital platforms are something that could bring the PC market back to life. There is only one middle-man between developer and players, so a much larger share gets back to creators of the game. This way, even if sales numbers are much lower than at retail, revenue can be competitive. It’s a good thing. 

Strategy Informer: How about the modding community? Despite recent events, many consider it a core area of PC Gaming - it might be a bit too soon for mod tools, but I imagine you've got nothing in particular against people doing what they can on their own? 

Klaudiusz Zych: Yeah, absolutely. It all depends on how the community reacts to our game. But we will try our best to not let them down. 

Strategy Informer: Interesting choice about not including multiplayer at all - we can't help but you think you can have it, but not "focus" on it as you claim other shooters do. Don't you think this goes against the competitive nature of the FPS? If there's anything we humans love most, it's competing. (I know you have leaderboards, but it's not quite the same as shooting someone in the face, is it?) 

Klaudiusz Zych: It’s not that multiplayer is a bad thing, by any means. Multiplayer games have just become so complicated that developing them requires as much, if not more, resources than a single-player game. Some companies even have two completely different studios to do single- and multiplayer, or even completely different engines. We are a small indie studio, and we just couldn’t handle a great single-player game together with great multiplayer. That’s why we focused on single-player gameplay. This time.

Strategy Informer: What do you feel is going to be the main draw of this game, or the main reason people are going to want to play it? Replayability? The Story? The weapons/gadgets etc...? 

Klaudiusz Zych: We tried to do a fishing rod technique with Hard Reset. We will try to hook the player with great visuals and physics and instant over-the-top action. And then we will slowly pull him or her in with an experience-based upgrade system and weapon unlocking for even more fun. 

And there are elements of replayability that will keep the player on board after finishing the game: you can start a new game and try a different weapon upgrade tree path, or you can try a “new game+” mode and play a new game from the beginning but with all the stuff you already earned. 

The rise of digital distribution has made 'protest' games like this viable once more. For a debut title, it's certainly risky, but then they're not trying to do anything that's beyond them. Given the quality of talent they've got (a lot of former CD Projekt guys), you know this going to be a quality product at any rate. Don't forget to check out our hands-on preview for more impressions. 

http://n4g.com/news/820920/hard-reset-interview-strategy-informer/com

wave based shooter,not really my cup of tea but i can give it a go if i want on my new pc,woooooooooot

"...with controllers and not keyboard and mouse. That requires different kinds of gameplay mechanics: cover system, regenerating health, auto-aim, etc. Console first-person shooters can’t be based on old-school skills, because they could become frustrating for more casual audiences. "

He totally hit the nail on the head as to why consoles can't have a good FPS game and there hasn't been a good one in like... years and years.

If you like the sound of this game be sure to check out http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=132731