Have you played Urban Reign? If so, how does that stack up? I really need to play through God Hand, although I doubt I'd go Hard mode to start.
Urban Reign is not even in the same league as God Hand in terms of how good it is, in terms of difficulty... I don't remember Urban Reign being that hard, so probably about the same on default? God Hand uses a scalable difficulty based on how well you're beating-them-up, but it's easy to keep it at the lowest setting (there's even a move you can do to drop it intentionally).