Cowboys, outlaws, ghosts, demons, werewolves. These are all good things. Combine them and you get a weird Western genre. This should be even better, right? Hard West 2 stands as a tactical weird western that knows the genre needs to look, feel and sound first and foremost. indicates that favorite.
Hard West 2 is a less literal, thematic sequel to 2015’s Hard West. It tells a new, unrelated story in a 20-30 hour campaign, with three challenges of escalating brutality to choose from. Even completionists don’t have to worry about playing the original before this one. You lead a gang of badass cowboys on the verge of a Hard West supernatural event. You’ve lost some souls after a bad deal with a bad devil gone horribly wrong and you’re very much hoping they’ll come back. . (By the way, the demon’s name is Mammon, and it has a very cool ghost train complete with giant metal centipede legs.)
The campaign is split between taking dialogue-driven quests in the Overworld area and diving into turn-based combat missions for most of your playtime. Writing in and out of missions is hit or miss. There are more than a few lines with weird grammar and eye-opening clichés, but it works well enough that you’re not skipping cutscenes or text-only explanations.
shoot em up
Hard West 2 is centered around tactical combat. They’re pretty good, but for everything I love about them, I hate something else. Missions feel more like puzzles than tactical exercises. On medium difficulty Hard, I had to redo multiple missions to find the solution to that puzzle and win. It’s balanced against flexible character abilities and the neat weapons available. Combined, they synergize with well-designed environments that allow for tricks, combos, and chain kills. form different powers.
There are 3 actions per turn, and shooting usually takes 2 or 3 of them. That is, the rules generally favor defensive combat. Your attacks deal constant damage based on the weapon you use. The only thing that changes is the chance to hit based on range, altitude, and enemy cover. Combined with that defensive focus, there’s a real problem to overcome when approaching new groups of enemies. Enemies may get an effective shot before you attack.
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Luckily, we have four tools to play with. The first is trick shooting, where certain weapons bounce bullets off metal objects to avoid enemy cover. The second is luck. This means that missed shots (among other things) fill the pool and can be spent on bonuses to attacks on later turns. The third is your character’s abilities, unique powers that everyone has: like Oldman Bill, who is full of bullets and likes to send back at enemies in explosive bursts, or if she Like Flynn who can magically swap places with anyone he can see, friend or foe, at the cost of a little health.
The fourth tool is Bravado, an important system for overcoming enemy advantage. When a character is killed, all action points are immediately replenished. They can do it as many times per turn you can get a kill and setting someone up to get 4, 5 or 6 kills in one turn is Hard West 2’s best It’s part of the puzzle-like difficulty, and it’s also a tension. Constantly ask for more kills every turn to do that calculation. Higher difficulties require a balance of optimal kill counts and defensive moves to be successful.
But beyond its standout mechanics, combat doesn’t do much new or exceptional, and lacks something I would have expected: Dynamite. That, and the fact that those area-of-effect attacks are two-dimensional, leads to weird situations like not being able to shoot someone with a shotgun because they’re on a balcony below. It makes up for the frustration, and the mix of interesting enemies and diverse missions keeps things fresh throughout.
wild bunch
Every mission is packed with weird Western cluttered characters that not only look great, but act as a cover to interact with and play with. The rickety wooden frontier streets packed with banks, the ramshackle homesteads strewn with disused farm equipment, the vast mining operations of the occult and steampunk – I think you get it. The mission objects and visuals are real cuteeven compared to the design and writing, the sound design and voice acting have few flaws. Dead Space When tomb Raider Composer Jason Graves.
It’s not just the atmosphere that’s exciting. The enemies you fight are weird and cool, ranging from mundane bandits and law enforcement officers, to Satanist covens, wendigos, and mindless revenant gunslingers. There’s also a bit of historical inspiration: one native antagonist group is a mirror version of the mustachioed evil twins of the real-life Ghost Dance Movement. Even if it’s more fantastic than that, don’t fall into the heinous trap of painting many natives of the West with one brush.)
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Gyn Carter, the rogue gambler and current soulless leader, is a fairly common RPG leader you’ll live with, while the other party members are memorable character design exercises. Kevin Conroy, who passed away in 1999 and is really grumpy about coming back, is with Old Bill. Lazarus, preacher of fire, brimstone and bullets. Cla’lish is voiced by her Mela Lee, a no-nonsense tracker and sniper from the Pacific Northwest who can also interact with and summon the dead.
But there are two things that really stand out. The first is Brandy Her Holsten playing Flynn, an orphaned woman at birth endowed/cursed with powerful witch abilities. She’s a relative newcomer, but she’s an up-and-coming actress. And a character I hated at first but grew to love: Laughing Deer, a completely clinically insane warrior sociopath. , don’t pretend otherwise. It can be a recipe for one-note boring characters at times, but voice actor Adam Gifford brings a free-spirited, scenery-chewing depth to LD that I can’t help but love. Cast Gifford to play a more radical character.
No wonder the Laughing Deer is also great fun to use in tactical combat. He is the lord of his Bravado-fueled killstreak. After all, you can never go wrong with your killshot angle when you’re in melee range.
Built hard, don’t need to kill hard
All of these characters are set personalities. Hard West 2 has some character building aspects and equipment to play with, but make no mistake, it’s a very tactical game. The RPG elements are effectively limited to dialogue choices, there are no character levels, and nearly every character his buffs are transferable between missions from one party member to another. These buffs mostly come in the form of cards. This is a mission reward and any character can hold 5 of her. By forming your poker hand with these cards, you unlock her character’s passive abilities and upgrade her active abilities. It was a fun thematic way to prepare and I loved it.
What I didn’t like was how rigid it was. Almost never. There are also some mechanically subpar designs, like Lazarus. I loved his character, but he has the power to rotate when a party member goes down… Losing one character causes all mainline story missions to fail instantly In the game… no permadeath and most other missions allow you to lose as much as you like.
Why should I use some of Lazarus’ precious few permanent upgrades when I can’t benefit from the most difficult missions? , obtained from making friends with inventory members. Better friends boost abilities — you can get more dialogue options that allow for different rewards and alternate paths during text-driven world map quests. I don’t feel like picking a favorite conversation when I know it’s going to get in the way.
