Preview by: William Abner

Flying Wild Hog may be a new developer but the company is filled with former members of People Can Fly, CD Projekt RED and City Interactive so while the name is new, the people behind the name come equipped with an impressive cache of resumes.

Hard Reset, a name that sounds like a bad Steven Segal movie, is its first project, a PC exclusive single player only shooter that pits man (you) against a legion of killer robots. I was recently supplied a press demo which allowed me to battle against the evil machines to get a feel for what this new shooter was all about.

It’s about, well, a lot of stuff that doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense. The narrative throws out organization names and makes references to things that have no meaning to me – everything sort of sounds like The Matrix or even The Terminator, looks like Blade Runner, and boils down to humans being in trouble and the machines taking over and you need to shoot the machines when you see them. The story is told comic book style via panels (it even uses the always loved Comic Sans font) but really it all comes down to shooting various types of robots and coming up with inventive ways to do it, using the environment as a weapon in addition to your personal arsenal.

I get the sense that Flying Wild Hog is gunning for an old school shooter feel with modern graphics. The demo’s gameplay feels spot on. This is a grab your gun and blow stuff up type of game. Best of all, it’s quite a looker and manages to run shockingly smooth on my PC which boasts a nowhere near cutting edge 3GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 3GB of RAM and a GeForce 8800 GT videocard and while you can poke me with a stick and tell me it’s time to upgrade, Hard Reset accepts my system with open arms and allows me to run it at 1920x1200 resolution without a hint of slowdown.

The old school feeling is provided not only by the fast paced gunplay but also by adding secret areas filled with ammo, energy (for guns that use it), health, and experience/upgrade points. These points allow you to stop at various locations throughout the game to upgrade your sensors, shields, health, energy weapon or regular machine gun. What’s nifty about these upgrades is that you always keep your two base guns but can install various upgrades which alter them, turning them into shotguns, grenade launchers, area of effect energy weapons, etc. Simply press a button and your machine gun transforms into a shotgun or a rocket launcher. So there’s no need to carry a slew of guns when two can do everything you need.

The energy weapon is particularly effective against swarms of smaller robots as one of the upgrades throws out a ball of electricity that then shoots beams that fry the little buggers, this makes for a great weapon when overrun by a mob of tiny bots with little saw blades attached to their front. Or the small helicopter bots. Or the little self destructing bots.