Final Thoughts
Before commenting on how Hard Reset plays using various hardware configs I'd just like to thank Flying Wild Hog for this great video game. There is a lot to love about Hard Reset and not all of it has to do with how the game performs.
For starters the lack of DRM is great news for gamers. The developer deserves a lot of credit for this, which is a little sad when you think about it, but that is the way things are. Another rarity is the affordable price tag. Flying Wild Hog is asking just $29.99 and it's available on Steam right now. When you consider that Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which we tested recently, still costs twice as much Hard Reset certainly seems like a bargain.
Moving on to the game's performance, Hard Reset plays really well using the ultra quality settings, with MLAA enabled the game is well optimized. Moreover the game looks fantastic and the levels feature an impressive amount of detail. For a kind of Doom, Quake, Painkiller or even Serious Sam-style first person shooter we have found Hard Reset to be a lot of fun. More importantly, like many games released this year it didn't force us to make a hard reset when playing, pun intended ;)
Apart from the obvious issue with Crossfire when using MLAA, the game played flawlessly on all hardware configurations. Still, given the performance advantage we recommend gamers use the MLAA setting just as the developer does.
Those with dual-core processors should be aware that their system is likely to suffer as we found quad-cores deliver significant performance boosts. Although the game only appears to heavily use two cores, the third and fourth cores do see lite usage.
Finally, those hoping to run the built-in benchmark as we did should download the free demo. Hopefully the developer will patch the benchmark feature into the full version of the game so that any future improvements can be easily tested.