Cyberpunk-themed shooter game? Bring it on! Hard Reset is the first game from the Polish studio Flying Wild Hog. I can only imagine the time pressure on the team to deliver. This shows in certain aspects of the game—most notably the story—but the game is well-polished, especially for an in-house engine. The devs are mostly dropouts from CD Projekt, and it definitely shows—this is far from a rookie effort! I wanted to start with this because if you look at the game from the right perspective, it’s a solid shooter, a well-executed project, but nothing more than that. Based on Steam reviews, this should be a masterpiece, but the press didn’t like it as much. It’s always interesting to see those discrepancies and try to figure out the underlying reason. In this case, it’s simple: the setting really sets this game apart. Cyberpunk fans are still generally underserved. Ever since cyberpunk entered the mainstream—which I tie to Blade Runner’s release in 1982, although the word “cyberpunk” is younger than that—there has been a palpable demand for games in the genre. However, it was never the hottest theme for shooters. First, we had fantasy settings thanks to Quake, then war shooters starting with Medal of Honor and blowing up with Call of Duty, and in parallel, sci-fi shooters inspired by Halo entered the scene. But cyberpunk in the shooter genre was probably limited to Deus Ex. System Shock is more of an adventure game, so let’s not count it as an FPS.
I keep wondering why—why so few shooters when the genre is so well-established? I mean, there’s not much you have to figure out. Dystopian, overdeveloped urban settings, megacorporations ruling the world, the little guy starting out working for one of them, only to bring down the whole system in the end. It’s audio-visually fleshed out, coherent, stylish—you really can’t go wrong with creating a game in this setting, can you?
So there we are in 2011, and I believe the above line of thought played out in the minds of Flying Wild Hog. And they won. I mean, this is an absolutely simple game, as vanilla of a shooter as it gets. Yet it works, because of the setting. The visuals are beautiful—not because of groundbreaking art direction, but because of the genre itself. The shooting mechanics are effective but simple, the enemies are boring, the story is as stupid as it gets, but it all adds up quite nicely to an enjoyable experience. It’s probably 5-6 hours long, with 8-10 levels if memory serves. The game does not reinvent shooting on a computer screen, but it’s worth the few bucks you can get it for during sales.
When it comes to scores, is the press or the gaming community right? Probably both—this is a 6.5/10 shooter, but the setting and visuals are 9/10.
