Parents' Guide to Hard Reset Redux

Although this shooter is an update of a 2011 game -- one intended to feel old-school at the time -- this remake can't help but feel creaky and dated. It intentionally sheds modern conventions of the first-person shooter, which means you can't use the environment for cover and there are no interruptions with lengthy cut scenes. Instead, the focus is squarely on shooting enemies until they're dead and traversing the maps. That's where its age is most apparent, because without a map screen you'll wind up hugging the walls on nearly every level to track where you haven't been and what you might have missed leading to where you're supposed to go. This all makes for a disjointed flow to the game -- fits and starts of shooting punctuated by staring at walls and hallways.

Which, honestly, is what many first-person shooters are like, and that's what makes Hard Reset Redux specifically hard to get overly excited about. It's unfair to count what's been done before against this game, but it's also extremely generic. There's a cookie-cutter plot involving a conspiracy, robots, and the end of humanity used as an excuse for blasting and shooting. While you can level up your guns, unlock a variety of new functions on them, and eventually get a sword, these wrinkles can't distract from how disorienting and confusing the core of the game can be -- especially if this is your first time playing an old-school shooter. Without a multiplayer mode, the meat on these bones is on the action described above. It's not that it's out-and-out bad, it's just that it doesn't all hang together all that engagingly. There are other games that do this better, which means this is likely only a look for purists or people wondering how new twists are being attempted on old-school titles.