Just about anything can be improved by adding the supernatural. Pirates of the Caribbean took advantage of a winning formula with its ghostly buccaneers, Stranger Things puts the demons in D&D, and Hard West has taken a hit with its tales of the strange wild west. An XCOM-esque tactics game, except when it isn’t, Hard West 2 brings some up-to-date ideas to the poker table.
Must know
What is it? Supernatural turn-based cowboy tactics
Expect to pay: $27/£24
Developer: Ice Code Games
Publisher: Good Shepherd Entertainment
Judged by: Threadripper 2950X, Geforce RTX 3080 10GB, 64GB RAM
Multiplayer? no
Clutch: hardwestgame.com (opens in new tab)
It starts with a train, as many of the best things do. You rob it of course, and after doing your research you know for sure that there are not many guards. ‘You’, in this case, is Gin Carter, a riding enthusiast, wearing hats and carrying six gunmen who is the nominal leader of a band of bandits. This train robbery is going to make him rich, you’ll see. With him are Laughing Deer, Native American melee specialist, Flynn, who appears vulnerable and keeps himself in the shadows, and trick-shooter Kestrel Colt.
The train guards don’t stand a chance, except that there are more than you expected. Fortunately, you have certain advantages that will serve you well during the game. The first is that your characters have three action points instead of the traditional two. This means they can move, heal and still shoot. Or sprint into cover and crouch for a better chance to dodge incoming fire.
Luck of the draw
Trickshots mean bouncing your bullets off hard surfaces to nullify the effect of cover, essentially surrounding the enemy with dishonesty. To facilitate this, wheelbarrows, piles of junk, and non-explosive barrels are scattered across levels. You can even shoot a bullet from hanging light fixtures. Then there’s luck, the addition of which makes your attacks more accurate.
However, it is bravado that makes the biggest difference. Kill an enemy and your action points will be replenished. It’s so simple, but affects combat in such a profound way. Suddenly they are chains to put on, to see how far they go. Living enemies are stepping stones to your goal, at the risk of them getting too long and being chopped to pieces on the next turn, or leaving other characters behind as you take one on a killing spree.
This means, at least in the early stages, that Laughing Deer is a killing machine. Bring him closer, add a dose of luck and he can club everyone to death, immediately filling his AP to move on to the next unlucky victim. Luck will eventually run out and enemies with more health will arrive, but he still hits hard. That makes it all too easy to leave him unprotected, miles from cover or allies when the turn ends just because you were having too much fun taking down bad guys.
Red Hot Poker
Back on the train, you’ve made your way to the driver’s cab. The locomotive enters a tunnel, everything turns black. When it comes out the other side, it crawls on hundreds of centipede-like metal legs, which is unusual for a steam train. There, as he stokes the cauldron, is a man who turns out to have some interesting powers of his own, and eventually reveals that he is Mammon, the devil himself. And he wants to play poker.
Of course you play. Of course you lose. The stake was only your soul, but if you had won, he would have given you the centi train, making it a very tempting offer. And he seemed like such a reliable man. The loss of your soul, interestingly enough, keeps you from casting a shadow. I’m not sure how that works.
Eventually you’ll unlock a gang of six outlaws, each with their own skills and inventory.
You wake up to the overworld map, a departure from the XCOM-esque base-building world, and a little more like Total War’s strategy layer mixed with a 2D RPG. You wander around here, discovering towns, mines and weird things along the way, you usually run into trouble and switch to turn-based combat mode to get yourself out of it again. You dig up (sometimes literally) new members of your group with new abilities, have short conversations, make decisions like taking or leaving supplies for the starving villagers, and exploring the eerie. Mammon and his centipede express to hell are still somewhere, making a mockery of both timetables and 19th-century engineering practices as they thunder through the countryside. If you kill him, you can get your soul back. In any case, it’s worth a try. And maybe it’s fun.
But for now it is cold. Going to a town would be good, because there might be shops there to buy new weapons, but first we need to check out that old shack along the road.
Dirty Dozen
Once you’ve built up a few extra members, you can start thinking about different ways to approach missions. The game shares more with Desperados 3 than a setting and a penchant for save-scumming, giving each character special abilities. Gin Carter has a close range ability that can shoot through cover and damage any enemy within his area of effect. Flynn can switch places with any character at the cost of one hit point each – great for taking a deep-seated enemy out of cover or taking out bad guys with only a little health left. Others have more eldritch endowments.
Ultimately, you unlock a gang of six outlaws, each with their own abilities and inventory, ready to tear apart the gunmen, shotgunners, exploding drunks (grenade launchers with seemingly infinite ammunition), zombies, and witches that plague every rickety wooden structure. Hard West 2 lives up to its name as enemies are plentiful and get pretty tough.
The replay value may be limited as levels are more like puzzles to solve, enemy positions aren’t mixed up when you try to shoot them again, and there’s no multiplayer.
They start with a single shot kill, but soon double their hit points, ending your bravado-fueled disaster unless you spend some time softening them first. Characters can have two weapons, plus throwables, each of which has different AP costs. Guns, for example, take all three action points to fire, but their damage and range are unmatched. Shotguns and explosives have an effect and can hurt your allies. Killing an ally can bring bravado though, so maybe it’s worth it, especially since members of your team never actually die, and come back to life after the fight with one hit point ready for a trip to the surgeon, if you’ve got the money.
Then there are the cards, which you occasionally pick up when you wander around the map. They are normal playing cards, only slightly enchanted, and on their own they can add extra hit points, luck or speed. But this is the old west, so if you give a character a valid poker hand, you get something extra. Having two pair might unlock a skill, but a full house raises it and a royal flush makes it even better. It may help to have a poker guide or Wikipedia handy while you are dealing cards unless you are a real cowboy.
Take Laughing Deer: he needs to hold a few to unlock his devastating Wild Run ability, which adds extra damage for every two squares he loads into battle. Add extra cards for a flush and an area of war cry effect is added to stun nearby enemies, while a straight flush increases base damage and gives allies a perk. Sending him zigzagging across the level in a maximum-range killing spree between enemies spread out, and watching the fires of bravado ignite every time he knocks another shooter to the ground is one of the most satisfying things the game has to offer. offer.
tree city
Less satisfying are the things you would expect to happen but don’t. Throwing a stick of dynamite should have a devastating effect on structures, which appear lightly built and tinder-dry. It does not. Attacks in effect are two-dimensional, limited to the level you’re at, and don’t affect those directly above or below it, which is especially frustrating with shotguns, which you should be able to use to knock someone off a roof. to hit. And cover can’t be blown away or overwhelmed, though the rest of the time your characters do their best to find their way, climb ladders and burst through windows. The replay value may be limited as levels are more like puzzles to solve, enemy positions don’t mix up when you shoot them again, and there’s no multiplayer.
Over time, enemies will appear that have the same sort of supernatural abilities as your characters, which feels like cheating on their part as their hit points return to normal after a flurry of gunfire. Then there are the massive amounts of explosives carried by other enemies, who like to attack and start to lure grenades everywhere, causing your characters to bleed their own hit points alarmingly fast. There are of course ways to reduce this, such as using the Heads Down maneuver to stop the bleeding and food to rebuild your points, but they all take action points.
But none of that matters, because Hard West 2 is as solid as the city bank vault. The ones the local bandits have made elaborate plans to rob. The combat is crunchy, the bits in between are no longer welcome, and the whole supernatural cowboy setting still has just enough shine to be captivating. There’s plenty of room in our city for a game like this.
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