Tag: Hard Reset

Welcome back to Triple Threat Review!

This is the ridiculously infrequent series where I pick three games at random off of my Steam list that I’ve never played before, play them for a couple of hours and tell you what I thought. Originally I scored them out of three, but I’ve since decided that was a bad idea and am instead going with a classic grading system. Every game will get a grade somewhere between “F” and “A+”, “F” being awful and “A+” being a game of the year contender.

If this is your first time here, then please check out the previous edition.

Now, let’s get to the games.

Board Battlefield

Developer & Publisher: Surrealscape Studios
Released: 10th August 2018
Steam Reviews: Mixed
Price: £1.69/$1.99/€ 1.59

The “casual” board game is one that has been attempted to great success throughout history, though it’s very rare to see in the video game sphere. Your household classics like Monopoly and Risk have countless video game adaptations; but most of the original digital board games you come across are designed for the board game enthusiast, rather than someone looking for a bit of light fun. So Board Battlefield is attempting to fill that void.

On the basic level, this game certainly fits into that genre. With a ruleset that can be learned in about two minutes and fairly quick games, it seems like something you can easily drop in and out of when you’re in the mood for a match. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much where the good points end

The ruleset itself is badly thought out, in order to win you must reach cross the 9×9 board to reach your opponent’s flag in the centre column, with only 3 types of units that have very basic functionality. The infantry can move forwards in a straight line, the artilleries can move diagonally, and the tanks can move in any of the four cardinal directions. This unit design combines with a couple of other factors to cause some pretty big issues.

Firstly, since the infantries can’t change the column their in at all, once the one in the middle dies, they become pretty useless, especially when the board get crowded with tanks and artilleries, they can’t really keep up with the fight effectively. Secondly, the way the artilleries are laid out, means that half the board is completely inaccessible to them. To compare them to the Bishops in Chess, the whole idea is that one can access one-half of the squares, while the other one can access the other half, but with the way the tiles are set up, it means that you can entirely avoid them as long as you’re paying attention to which squares they can’t touch.

Perhaps the biggest issue though, is the method by which you actually move your troops. At the start of your turn, you roll a die, land either a 1, 2 or 3, and pick one piece to move that number of spaces, this is a horrible way of doing things. I can understand why you’d want to limit the number of spaces you can move in a game like this, but having it down to RNG is awful. The game advertises itself as “a unique blend of skill and luck”, but when the luck is such a key element of the game, it makes the level of skill almost completely unimportant.

Finally, the game has an XP system, where through winning matches you level up and unlock new features that you can use in future games. These include: spawning in new units, placing landmines or bombing a massive portion of the map. A couple of the reviews I’ve read say that the game reaches it’s true potential once these things become available. So my question is quite simple. If those features are so important to making the game fun, why would you hide them behind unlocks? All it means, is you have to spend a handful of hours playing the unfun version before you can get a game worth playing.

I don’t hate the idea of Board Battlefield, but the execution is extremely lacking, even once you unlock the other features, the game doesn’t feel very well thought out at all. I’m tempted to cut it some slack since it costs the same as a cheap sandwich, but quite frankly for a game like this? I’d rather have the sandwich.

Grade: F

Hard Reset Redux

Developer: Flying Wild Hog
Publisher: Good Shepard Entertainment
Released: 3rd June 2016
Steam Reviews: Very Positive
Price: £14.99/$19.99/€ 19.99

I’ve never really been the biggest fan of first-person shooters, I’m not entirely sure why I just find the style of gameplay doesn’t really bring any joy out of me and considering it’s a genre largely dominated by the AAA military shooter, which is generally a style of game I despise, I struggle to find much fun in it. So, when I come across a first-person shooter trying to do something that isn’t the industry norm, I become intrigued.

I didn’t realise this at the time, but Hard Reset originally released in 2011 – with this “redux” version released in 2016 – and it does seem to have a lot of the design philosophies from that time period. 2011 was towards the end of the big first-person shooter boom where every studio under the sun wanted a piece of the pie and generally online multiplayer was the way to go. Hard Reset, however, decided it wanted to go more down the Halo route of a linear Sci-fi shooter instead.

I immediately groaned at this, since it wasn’t just a Sci-fi shooter, it was a dark and dreary Sci-fi shooter, and that ticks off pretty much all the boxes on my “games I don’t care about” list. Nevertheless, I persevered and was immediately greeted with a comic-book esque style opening, featuring Gruff McCoolGuy or whatever his name was. As with almost all games like this, the plot is completely irrelevant since the reason we’re all here to shoot the things.

The things in question are robots, just below zombies and nazis on the list of “dystopian future bad guys”, which would be fine if there were more than 4 different variations on them. This brings me to the first problem I have with the game which is a severe lack of variety, both in enemy and level design. Granted, I only played the first three levels and I get that it’s a rundown city, so everything’s going to look fairly similar, but not every level has to be raining at nighttime. Some levels could’ve at least been set in a big unique building or something like that. It means there’s no motivation for discovery in the game because I feel like I’ve seen everything already.

The enemy designs look pretty decent, but like I said there just isn’t enough variation in the types. Some are different colours but they all still do the same things, and it means I figured out my tactics to defeat each one straight away and I never needed to change it. This leads to quite the lack of difficulty throughout the game, the only tactics the game tries in order to up the difficulty as you progress is either throwing more things at you – which never really works – or giving you less room to manoeuvre, which is slightly more effective, but still not too much of a challenge to work around.

It’s not all bad though, as the most important aspect of the game – the shooting – is actually quite fun. It doesn’t have the same brutality to it as Doom or the same tactical satisfaction as in Farcry, but when I was blasting through waves of enemies with my shotgun I was having fun doing it. It has the kind of speed that I like from, first-person shooters and it feels like my shots have impact as enemies recoil after almost every hit.

Hard Reset may be a flawed game, but one that kept me hooked just long enough to develop a bit of a fondness for it. I probably won’t go out of my way to finish it any time soon, but the next time I’m in the mood to mindlessly shoot some things for a bit, I might come back around to it.

Grade: C-

Q.U.B.E

Developer & Publisher: Toxic Games
Released: 21st May 2014
Steam Reviews: Very Positive
Price: £6.99/$9.99/€ 7.99

Another one that’s slightly older now (although it did have a sequel released in 2018) in the big puzzling world of Q.U.B.E. Being a first-person puzzle game can be quite the tricky thing to do, especially on the PC market, because everyone instantly assumes you’re trying to be Portal, and I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t my first impression of Q.U.B.E.

Upon starting the game, you’re instantly greeted with a pristine white set of test chambers, as a mysterious voice – which may or may not be trustworthy – explains the situation to you. Needless to say, I started to roll my eyes at this, as I thought I was in for another Quantum Conundrum situation. However, once all the exposition had been dumped on my the puzzles started coming my way, and I was rather pleased with what I found.

The basic premise is that there are lots of differently coloured blocks in every chamber, and they all do different things based on their colour. You can interact with these blocks by either pulled them out or pushing them in to make your way to the exit on each level, and the difficulty progresses from there.

Like most puzzle games, I found myself speeding through the early areas before the game eventually introduced enough mechanics to grind me to a halt and have to think about what I was doing. The game splits itself up into chunks, and each section focuses on a different type of mechanic, for example: Manually positioning blocks to reach the exit, making a ball the right colour to go in a hole and using gravity manipulation to position blocks to open the door. So far though, the game has never overlapped any of these mechanics (aside from the very base ones) and I worry that it will never combine any of the things I’ve learned together to create a real challenge. Like I said though, I’ve not yet completed the game, so that may happen in the final levels.

The story so far has been something I’ve been happy to ignore, you have two voices in your ear telling you opposite things about what’s going on, and you can work out for yourself which one is lying. It’s certainly nothing new, and it really doesn’t help quell the number of people unfavourably comparing it to Portal, so I tend to just ignore it. It does, however, lead to long stretches between puzzle where you just stand there and watch the world very slowly go by while the game tells you the story, so that could’ve been implemented much better.

The only other big flaw is something that will admittedly only affect a minority of players but does seem pretty important. This game is entirely reliant on you being able to identify different colours in order to work out what each thing does, and while there are contextual clues around the world, there is no colourblind mode to play the game with. I did check and the sequel does have a colourblind mode in it, but one was never added to the original, so be warned.

Despite these flaws, the game is still a very fun and challenging puzzle game. it’s managed to nicely tow that line of difficulty where I’m not flying through everything, but I’m also not getting frustrated at them. It has a whole host of ideas that I’ve not seen anywhere before and the focus it puts on each mechanic individually is something I wish more puzzle games did. Is it as good as Portal? No, not by a long shot, but am I going to see it through to the end and have a good time doing so? Yes, absolutely.

Grade: B

So there you have it! Thank you very much for taking the time to read this, if you’ve played these games then let me know what you thought of them, either in the comments below or on Twitter @10ryawoo. Finally, make sure you come back here this time next week where I’ll be running down the best Pay-Per-View openers in WWE history!