![]() ![]() There’s no saving when you’re in the middle of these scenarios so a failure means you start the fight from the beginning. A bad move can result in an instant death, and sometimes a single death can fail a fight. This frustration is heightened by Hard West’s punishing difficulty. Even fifteen hours into the game, I couldn’t always guarantee my tactical maneuvers were going to pay off. Other times I felt like I was in a position to nail a sure fire hit, only to find out my to-hit chances were less than 50%. ![]() Sometimes I thought I had an enemy flanked, only to find out the game counted him as still in cover. There are some notable problems with Hard West’s tricky combat and the biggest one is that the rules don’t always seem set in stone. The strategies become almost puzzle-like as you attempt to maneuver your characters through the map, always keeping them protected, while finding the right angle to take out the enemies. This forces players to always try to stay hidden while equally trying to outflank enemies. However, when in cover damage is significantly reduced. ![]() A character whose Luck is at 100 and out in the open will still be able to dodge a shot, but a character behind cover whose Luck is at zero will most certainly be hit. Whenever a character is shot at, their Luck meter will be depleted based on how much cover they have. It tries to spice up this type of combat by introducing elements like Luck and adding in special abilities, but it never really succeeds in bringing it all together. Channeling the combat mechanics of games like X-COM, Hard West puts a focus on staying in cover and flanking enemy positions. Burning villages and murdering as servant of demons is just as fun as trying to protect the innocent, and Hard West allows you to do both.Ībout three times during each scenario players will be forced into the game’s turn-based shootouts. But as the game grows darker and introduces characters with nastier personalities, it affords the players to revel in some of the darker choices without creating a dissonance from the story. Playing as the main character in the early stages of the game, I tried to walk the straight and narrow and help my neighbors. The different perspectives also allow players to treat the world in different ways. But the fact that these mechanics are so briefly explored means you won’t find much depth to them. It’s impressive how each scenario boasts its own overworld mechanics, completely unique to the part of the story it tells. Then, when you switch to a rogue scientist trying to cure a mysterious plague, the overworld mechanics shift from gold collection to craft-heavy mechanics which focus on collecting blueprints and creating new items. When you first begin the story playing as the main characters and his father, you travel through an overworld map attempting to run a successful gold-mining operation. Some of this is baked into the mechanics. The benefit to this multi-perspective storytelling is that it affords different play-styles throughout the game. I never rolled my eyes or felt the story was unbearably awful, but I also never felt a rooting interested in the characters other than to progress through the game. Even while it begs for involvement, narrating the action like a dungeon master, referring to the main protagonist in the 2nd person “you”, I couldn’t help but feel a detachment from the characters. The disjointed narrative, leaping from character to character, isn’t necessarily bad but it never attains a deeper level of connection. Unfortunately these text-heavy moments are all pretty dry and lack the atmosphere that fills the majority of Hard West. These large chunks of text describe the action as you move through the overworld map. When there isn’t a narrator there is often text which describes your interactions with secondary characters. The story is mostly told through the gravely voice of a single narrator doing his best Sam Elliott impression - which isn’t bad. Thus begins the journey of Hard West as these scattered characters attempt to change their fortunes and get revenge on those who wronged them. The charm turns the fortunes of our heroes sour and soon a happy family is left cursed and separated. When the unnamed protagonist and his father set out to find gold in the west, they are quickly waylaid when the father purchases a cursed charm from a mysterious gentlemen. Hard West’s story unfolds over eight scenarios, leaping between characters and time periods. ![]()
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