Hard West Reviews

10 years(ish) later and the game still has bugs that completely brick your progress from minute 1. Characters getting stuck in environment from the get go from the tutorial should haw been a huge red flag. Played 2 more missions and had to restart about 10 times to avoid the same bug on both player and enemy turns. The second game is on sale currently and seriously considering not buying if this is how the developers treated the original post release.

No options while in game, can't even adjust the audio levels. Silly.

Turn based squad game, who wouldn't like XCOM set in the Old West? Solid game, simple mechanics, lots of fun

I really want to like this game. The aesthetic seems neat; dark fantasy in the wild west, that's an incredible concept especially when you seemingly have the literal devil running around. Yet the gameplay, for a tactical offering, ends up being really stale and killing my motivation to play. Move into cover, take shots from the enemy, move to different cover (and hopefully flank the enemy so you can actually hit them), and then take pot shots until they're all dead. You can get access to abilities from cards to mix things up, but the resource you need to use them is tied to your "luck" (a bar above your life total that gets subtracted from when you get shot at and when it hits 0 you start taking damage to your actual health) so more often than not you just won't be able to use those abilities at all because you're spending all your luck avoiding damage. Taking a hit on one of your characters is usually immediate death and in the prologue all of the characters are required, so it's an instant-loss if someone goes down... meaning you have to start the whole mission over if you made a single mistake. I later learned there is an option for quick saving in the settings menu but i'm not sure why this isn't just the default... I'm also just not enamored with the map system. There are lots of different areas that appear on the map in the first campaign that are like gold nodes you can mine for resources, but how you get gold from them doesn't feel very well explained and more often than naught I just felt like I was losing money trying rather than making any actual progress. I tried a bit of another campaign before giving up, featuring an inventor guy as the new main character. And even though you no longer have to mine for gold on the map, you instead get this mess of a research progress bar that seems to gate your ability to interact with certain events that appear on the map... not a great feeling. I don't hate this product, but it doesn't enthuse me enough to keep going and so I have a really hard time recommending it on anything other than a deeply discounted sale.