I noticed there wasn't any compiled information about running this game so I decided I would type up something in case new runners are interested. Obviously, if you want to run the 2016 Redux version of the game that reverse imported the Shadow Warrior Remake movement / physics into the game, you'll want to go over the Hard Reset Redux page which already has a decent amount of starting information for running that game.
Most of the tricks in the original Hard Reset involve the game's slippery physics and movement and a lot of weird map collisions. Expect a lot of precision spamming of the spacebar. Any% for this game ends after the Hospital level since it was the final level at the time during launch. Any% including the Exile levels has its own category and is the "true" full game run if you want to go through all the levels front to back.
Some things to note when starting out: -Make sure to enable fast menu and disable the opening movie in the options menu if you haven't already. For obvious reasons this makes restarting the game a very painless process. Optionally. you can also delete the opening movie files from the game entirely. This process is outlined on the PCGW page for this game if you want to do that. Just keep in mind that if you end up reinstalling or verifying your game files through Steam that this will restore the opening movie file.
-In the graphics settings, make sure that the physics setting is always set to default. If it is set to Ultra, props are a lot harder to move and it makes a lot of arenas and certain skips very frustrating.
-This game does not support borderless windowed and if you try to force it with a third party program the graphical aspect of the game has a very high chance of glitching out to where the game is basically unplayable. Hard Reset is also a game that hates when you tab out of it when fullscreen is enabled and sometimes it will fail to reload the graphics, causing the visual aspect of the game to freeze. A restart is almost always necessary for any graphical issues.
-This game has a very strange graphical issue which seems to somehow be tied to the "reload last checkpoint" function whether you use it through the menu or bind it to a key. It will increase the chances for certain levels to not load their textures at all, making the level look like a huge transparent block of lighting effects, the skybox, props, and enemies. The collisions are still the same, so it's basically like doing the level blind. I experimented a lot to try and discover how this graphical glitch is triggered and the liberal use of the reload checkpoint functions led to an almost consistent appearance of this glitch on one of three levels: Bazaar, Underground, or Hospital. Underground is the only level of these three that is reasonable enough to do blind as much of it is indoor, and even the long bridge part can be done consistently because you can shoot the rifle to find the path to walk on. The other two levels however have skips that impossible to do consistently with no visual footholds. If this happens to you, simply Alt + F4 to quickly close the game and restart. Restarting the game always fixes this issue, and it is the ONLY fix for this issue. Any console commands that I've tried to mitigate this either do nothing or don't fix the texture issue. I also tried changing every graphics setting individually one by one and none of them will cause the textures to reload. I do not know if there is any further information on this or why it happens. I've had two different computer builds in the time I've done speedruns for this game and I've dealt with this glitch on both.
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In this game, you have two base weapons that can be upgraded to morph into a variety of different weapons. With NG+ runs, you will not need to worry about weapon upgrades as you start with all of them from the get go. I have not performed any NG+ runs for this game yet but Dencity has a run up you can reference to for more information on that. In standard NG Any%, the current run optimization only involves the CLN gun with a few upgrades at very specific points of the game:
-CLN Grenade Launcher - get during Sector 6 while opening the door to the tower with the elevator, make sure you have enough Nano for an upgrade by the time you power on the elevator after the Sector 6 skip. This is arguably the most important weapon you'll get in the entire game due to the grenade stacking exploit which I will explain below.
-CLN Rifle Firestorm Upgrade - get at the beginning of the Atlas level right at the upgrade terminal near the bus used for the bus skip into the arena, increases rate of fire which makes the rifle a lot more useful
-CLN Combat Shotgun + Octopus Upgrade - get during Underground after the rooftop skip in the outside area where you fight two heavy grenadiers. The upgrade terminal is next to the door you open to proceed into the final indoor parts of the level. The shotgun is really good for taking out the smaller enemies and the fleshy humanoid robots. The octopus upgrade simply shortens the reload time for the shotgun so you can shoot it faster.
In the Exile DLC levels, you will get an extra CLN upgrade and then you will spend the rest on upgrading the NRG weapon:
-CLN Combat Shotgun Flechette Upgrade - get at the very beginning of Crusher at the first upgrade terminal which is on your left after you leave the initial room with all the scrap. The flechette upgrade allows you to shoot little flechette rounds from your shotgun that stun enemies in place. It has a wide spread that allows you to stun multiple enemies which is very helpful for the new helicopter enemies that are green and harder to kill, as well as the new junkyard gorillas which can tank a lot more damage due to having armor. Flechettes prevent enemies from dodging so expect to switch between the shotgun and the grenade launcher quite a bit to earn easy multikills.
-NRG Railgun - get at the very beginning of Rail Yard at the first upgrade terminal immediately on your right. You'll want 3 nano upgrades at the very least by the time you start this level. You'll need to spend two of them on the Shock Blaster in order to be able to unlock the Railgun. Get the Shock Blaster and the Tongs upgrade, clear out the mob of small enemies in front of the gate, then purchase the Railgun before the flying police cruisers show up. This is primarily used for the flying enemies that show up quite a few times on this level.
-NRG Railgun Venom Upgrade - preferably you'll want to get this at the very end of Rail Yard at the upgrade terminal that is next to the door control that ends the level. If you're just short, you should be able to get it at the first upgrade terminal in Factory which is in the very first console room that turns on the presses and spawns all the junkyard gorillas. At the latest you'll want to get it at the upgrade terminal on the second floor before you activate the shooting gallery sequence because it will make it significantly easier to clear. The upgrade makes the railgun cooldown shorter.
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Most of the skips in this game are very self-explanatory and look almost exactly like they do on video. You can learn the majority of this game by just watching runs and trying to attempt them on your own. A lot of the run is just ramping up and pressing spacebar at the right times allowing you to scale map geometry for sequence breaks. There are a few tricks in this game however that are worth explaining, so I'll go ahead and outline those really quickly.
Results Screen Skip: I don't recommend this trick because it involves using the "load last checkpoint" key which, as I described above, can cause graphical issues in the game. However, I will still mention it since I did use the trick in past speedruns for this game. Basically, once the game stops you from being able to control Fletcher after you hit the end level trigger, you can hit the load last checkpoint key and it will skip the entire results screen load and immediately go into the cutscene / loading screen for the next level. Saves a few seconds each level except for Hospital / Arena depending on what run you're doing.
Grenade Stacking: The CLN grenade launcher has a slight delay before the grenade is ejected from the gun after you click M1. During this time, you'll see the cooldown meter on the crosshair fill up. As soon as you see the meter but before the grenade actually leaves the gun, you will want to switch immediately to another weapon. Usually the easiest way to do this is just use the scroll wheel to change to the previous weapon type on the CLN gun. Each time you do this, you'll get another stacked grenade in your gun that will expel all at once when you finally shoot the grenade launcher. This is incredibly useful for taking out gorillas (the armored heavy enemies) and the heavy grenadiers, as well as for a quick Atlas fight. As far as I'm aware, there's no way to stack more grenades than the max ammo will allow (which is around 13) but there are no common enemies in this game that require more than 4 grenade stacks to kill.
Underground Hanger Grenade Skip: In the Underground level, there is a part only about a quarter way through the level where you enter a hanger from a platform that is above the ground and quickly breaks off at the end. There are two railings on the platform and if you jump on the right one, there's a platform that you can jump to diagonally that has a 200 Nano pickup near some boxes. From there, you can cross a suspended bridge to skip the entire hanger arena, but the area you need to get to is on the other side of a little obstruction on the wall. There's an invisible collision area that's bigger than the wall which prevents you from just jumping around it, so you have to do a grenade jump to make the extra distance. This is a very precise trick to set up and it's very easy to mess up. You need to shoot a grenade down on the bridge that's angled behind you so that it will blast you diagonally across the gap to the little platform protruding from the railing where you go to continue the level. The best way to time this is shoot the grenade on the platform, then shoot another immediately into the distance when the cooldown finishes. By the time the new cooldown meter reaches a quarter left, your first grenade will detonate. You need to time your run and jump to coincide with that explosion to consistently do this trick right. I recommend practicing it a lot because this is late in the Any% run and it's easy for runs to die here if you mess it up too much.
Hospital Garage Box Skip: In the Hospital level, after the first arena on the highway, you will immediately entire the parking garage of the hospital. There is a very quick wave of exploding enemies that you can fend off pretty quickly using an explosive barrel and one of the cars on the left side as you enter. Once you finish them all off, there's a box in the left side corner that you can push around. Across the way to the right side of the garage, there's a piece of geometry hanging down from the upper floor with a 50 Nano pickup on it. You want to push the box so that it is placed adjacently to the right of that hanging platform. The parking garage floor in that area suddenly increases in elevation slightly at the edge below the hanging platform, and the box cannot slide up it. You'll want to place the box longways against that elevated ground. Once you have it positioned, you need to enable vertical sync in the video options. This will force the game to run at a lower framerate which makes the physics of the box easier to control. You'll want to run into the box so that it bumps up against the elevated ground, allowing it to become an elevated slope. Then you need to immediately jump up onto the elevated box and use it as a platform to jump up to the hanging platform. If you do it right, you should be able to get this skip very quickly and consistently with that setup, which allows you to skip the entire arena and move on to the higher floors of the hospital. Make sure to turn vertical sync off once you have performed the skip.
Hospital Spawn Trigger Skip: This one is a little vague as it has been inconsistent for me from run to run, but I'll try to explain it. After you get the first two AI matrices in the Hospital level and the wall breaks open, you'll kill a few guys which will open a door that leads you out and around the outside of the building very briefly. In the first part, there's a slope where a medical cart rolls down. If you very quickly jump around the right side of that slope and jump up fast enough past the medical cart, by the time you enter the window back into the Hospital, the next area will only have the exploding enemies that spawn from the ceiling in two very defined places. All the other enemies will not spawn. This saves about 5-6 seconds if well optimized.
Any other skips as I said before can be learned just by watching a run and seeing them performed. Exile has two levels with full level skips (Junkyard and Arena) and one level with two pretty big skips that save a lot of time (Rail Yard). The other two (Crusher and Factory) have no skips and are currently just arena optimization. I've tried to see if there are any potential skips for these two levels but because of the way they are designed it is a lot harder to find ways to break out of them, so as of now they are the only levels with no skips as far as I know.
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That's all the relevant information I can think of for this game. I typed this up for fun but if you're interested in running this game I hope this helps. If I think of anything else or by some chance learn something new about this game, I will post it here.
