More importantly, however, I've wasted far too much time playing a game called Hard Reset and also I've fallen back in love/hate with another time-sucker called Ultratron. I didn't expect much, since I didn't pay much — Hard Reset came as part of a $4 bundle from Bundle Stars, and Ultratron came in a $1+ bundle from Humble Bundle — but I've played almost 50 hours of the former and nearly 40 hours of the latter, so I probably got my money's worth.
Hard Reset is a gorgeous first-person shooter with some interesting weapon design, a minimalist heads-up display, and a heavy emphasis on using environmental hazards to destroy the seemingly endless waves of mechanical bad guys. The game was developed by some of the same people who made Painkiller and, like its occult-themed cousin, Hard Reset is often described as an "old-school" shooter — a throwback to the days of Doom and Quake. To some extent, this is accurate. Unlike so many modern video games, this one doesn't try very hard to be a movie. It's not filled with excessive dialogue and exploding set pieces and scripted action sequences. It's non-stop running and gunning all the way through. It's all about challenging the player. It's a real game. It does attempt to tell a story — perhaps it even tries a little too hard — but, just as in Painkiller, it's not a very good story and it should probably be ignored anyway.
Most of the exposition takes place during loading screen cut scenes, drawn and badly animated in the style of a comic book. When you get to one of these loading screens, I suggest that you go and make a sandwich or something. The plot hardly makes any sense, the acting and writing are both profoundly awful, and the protagonist (made immediately ridiculous by a hilariously typical video-game-action-hero voice) was apparently designed by some 12-year-old kid who thinks the unnecessary use of profanity is just the coolest thing ever conceived. For all intents and purposes, Hard Reset doesn't have a plot. It's far more story-driven than Painkiller, but even if you manage to decipher what's going on, you're not going to care in the end.
Where Hard Reset really strays from its old-school shooter roots is in the adoption of some modern gameplay mechanics. If you'll allow one more comparison to Painkiller, I'd like to point out that its demon-slaying protagonist could run circles around almost any enemy... or, more accurately, he could jump circles around any enemy. While running speed was rather slow in Painkiller, the player could accumulate a lot of extra speed by repeatedly jumping. Although this trick was not explained in any tutorial, it was crucial. This high mobility was a staple of Painkiller gameplay, and provided an advantage over the enormous hordes of enemies that would otherwise surround the player. Hard Reset, on the other hand, has painfully slow running speed and no "bunny hopping" ability. Instead, you just get a sprint button which allows a modest boost in speed for only a couple of seconds.
The limited sprinting ability does manage to be useful, but only marginally so. I must stress that "a couple of seconds" is no exaggeration. The protagonist runs out of breath faster than a morbidly obese pack-a-day smoker with one leg. The result is a game that feels maddeningly sluggish to fans of the same fast-paced old-school shooters to which games like Hard Reset and Painkiller draw so many comparisons. The problem is exacerbated by certain enemies whose attacks often seem unavoidable and — I'm convinced — sometimes are. Running at the speed of a tortoise, armed with only two seconds of slightly-faster-than-tortoise sprinting, can be extremely frustrating when you're being bombarded with missiles and you can't think of a way to output enough damage to kill the enemy before his carpet bombing attack kills you.
Even switching to the right gun can be a bit of a chore — a waste of time when there's no time to waste — thanks to the game's interesting but gimmicky weapon system. Most of the first-person shooters of my childhood days would allow the player to carry a totally unrealistic number of weapons (usually the game's entire arsenal) at once for the sake of fun. On the other hand, most modern shooters limit the player's holding capacity (usually to two or three guns) either for the sake of realism, or for ease of access when using a console gamepad instead of a full keyboard, or for the increased challenge that might be faced by the player when he or she is forced to drop a useful rocket launcher in order to pick up a needed sniper rifle. The weapon system in Hard Reset almost seems like a parody of these modern trends in that, technically, only two guns exist in the entire game.
The player is immediately given an assault rifle and a plasma rifle. The gimmick is that each of these guns can be upgraded with up to four additional weapon modes, and most of these weapon modes have both a primary and a secondary function. So you'll get your shotgun, your grenade launcher, your rocket launcher, your lightning gun, and your big laser canon. You'll even be able to hold them all at once. Unfortunately, all of those functions will be crammed into two weapons, which means you often have to switch to the correct gun and then to the correct firing mode instead of just going directly to the weapon you want. This can be a problem when you need to pull the right weapon quickly, especially since the timely use of stunning weapons on fast enemies is all that compensates for the protagonist's lack of speed.
Despite these issues, Hard Reset is pretty decent. You'll need to adapt to the unusual weapon system, and you'll need to get over the fact that the main character can't run twenty feet without taking a breather, and you'll need to pretend the laughable plot doesn't exist... but none of these are reasons not to play. If there's a reason not to play, it's a lack of patience and an unwillingness to lose a lot before winning. Hard Reset is a rarity in modern times — a truly punishing game whose higher difficulty levels will be deemed impossible by many players.
As for me, it seems I'm a masochist. After starting at the easiest difficulty setting, I decided to work my way up to the hardest. Normal mode all right, Hard mode was frustrating, and Insane mode nearly caused me to smash my computer on numerous occasions. At this level, the game becomes a nightmare. The toughest enemies are bullet sponges, practically unavoidable projectile attacks can kill you in seconds, and you're forced to adopt strategies that weren't necessary before. The use of immobilizing weapons, like stasis grenades and EMP bursts, becomes an absolute necessity, and players who fail to utilize environmental hazards like explosive red barrels will find it difficult to overcome the cruel mathematical problem of dealing enough damage to the enemies before inevitably being shredded to pieces. The infinite waves of little enemies that harass you during boss fights are suddenly a real threat, and they'll kill you as often as the bosses themselves do. Splash damage from explosive weapons will kill you even when you think you're behind cover. When playing the higher difficulty modes, you will die a lot, even if it's not your fault. The game isn't fair.
But I beat it anyway. I kept trying even when I thought it was impossible. I responded to the game's unfair tactics with some unfair tactics of my own. I had an all-out battle of patience and reflexes and wits against a computer and won.
The only problem is that Insane mode isn't actually the highest difficulty. There's one more, called Heroic mode. It's even harder. Worse yet, mid-level checkpoints are removed. You have to beat entire levels without screwing up at all, and the levels are long. Throughout most of Insane mode, I died at least once or twice in every fight, and dozens of times in others.
I think this is where I give up. I don't think I'll ever get through Heroic mode. Even if I'm capable, I just lack the willpower. I've played through the entire game four times and it's no longer fun enough to justify that kind of frustration. And that's okay — I'm fine with that — except that my completion of the game will forever be stuck at 98%. There are just two achievements left: one for beating Heroic mode and then, stupidly, another achievement for unlocking all achievements.
It's just so close that I can't not be annoyed.
I don't usually care much about achievements. Some people can't get enough of them, and some people absolutely despise them. Most of the time, I'm indifferent. Optional challenges are great, as long as they're actually fun, and whether those optional challenges come in the form of "achievements" or some other functionally equivalent feature with a less silly name is irrelevant. If I play all the way through a game and I want to play it some more, the additional challenges are something worth considering. Sometimes I decide to ignore them.
But that's hard to do when I've already done all but a couple of them. It's not even about the pride of reaching 100% completion; it's about leaving things unfinished. It's about the fact that achievements on Steam are a permanent record that I have to see whenever I look at the game in my library, even if it's not installed. It's about something being so close to perfection and not being perfected. As far as I'm concerned, 0% is just as good as 100%, but numbers like 1% and 99% are the worst.
I have a similar issue with Ultratron, the other beautiful, chaotic, punishing, evil-robot-themed game I've been playing recently. If you understand that the title is a reference to Robotron: 2084, you probably already know that this one isn't a first-person shooter. Ultratron is a top-down arena shoot-em-up with highly stylized faux retro graphics and a multitude of ridiculous power-ups. Much like Titan Attacks, the over-the-top Space Invaders clone made by the same developer, Ultratron starts out slow and then gradually becomes an unforgiving hell of colorful projectiles and flashy explosions. And it's more addictive than heroin.
I loved Titan Attacks so much that I played it until I had all the achievements unlocked. I thought I loved Ultratron that much too, but a few of the achievements are just stupidly difficult. Once you're past a certain point, the game becomes extremely intense, and you only get a checkpoint every ten levels — after, not before, each boss. Worse yet, some of the most challenging achievements require a certain number of kills, and the counter resets to zero if you start playing from a checkpoint. If you want the game to count your 10,000 kills, you'll have to get them all in a single playthrough without ever dying. It doesn't have to be all in one sitting, since you can save at any time, but that save disappears after it's loaded. Saving is for taking breaks, not for backing up your progress.
I got fed up with Ultratron after a while, and stopped playing it for months, but I'm back at it again. I told myself I was just going to play a few rounds, but now I'm looking at those last few achievements and saying "yeah, I can totally do that." And I probably can't, but 94% is so close to 100% that it's hard not to try. I should also note that we're not really dealing with additional challenges, in this case, since Ultratron is one of those arcade-style game that goes on as long as you can keep winning. The game doesn't have a real "ending" so the completion of achievements is really the only form of "winning" there is.
Sure, it's silly to be so irritated by falling short of 100% completion, but at least I have the sense to know I'm being silly. At least I'm not so determined that I'm willing to keep playing these games past the point where they stop being enjoyable. When I wanted to unlock the last few achievements in L.A. Noire, just for the sake of neatly wrapping up a fairly enjoyable game, I just used a walkthrough for those idiotic scavenger hunt achievements (Star Map, Auto Fanatic, and Hollywoodland) because doing it myself would have taken so long that I would have hated the game by the time I was done with it.
Not everything can be helped with a walkthrough, though. So should I try to beat Ultratron? Should I bother to clear that last hurdle in Hard Reset? Surely I've blown up more than enough robots this year, with a combined 85 hours in these two games alone (plus whatever uncounted hours I spent playing them with Steam in offline mode). I guess the answer is "maybe someday."
Or maybe I'll just use Steam Achievement Manager — a tool whose use I never understood before now — to unlock these practically impossible achievements just so I'm not tempted to waste endless hours actually attempting them. Trying to master everything I play is exactly why I'll never get through my backlog.
