Hard West Reviews

Turnbased-tactics isometric paranormal western. Doesn't do anything spectacular, but a snacky six hour campaign, soaking up some pretty good atmosphere.

Cowboy Xcom with the devil showing up every so often isn't the most fair way to explain this game; but its close. This game makes you question your tactical prowess every turn.

Good idea, poor execution. Still a somewhat enjoyable experience. It's more of a vibe game rather than a tactical one.

There are some minor problems with this game that are adequately resolved by the sequel Hard West 2. It isn't a bad game at all, but it is fairly high-investment and doesn't feel like it pays off very consistently; I can spend quite a long time on a combat scenario and progress such a tiny amount that it feels almost pointless to complete the combats. This is in contrast to games like XCOM, where the character progression feels pretty rapid early-on, and then hits a sort of sigmoid inflection point where each further advance is very expensive (but also very powerful). This is nicely tempered by the mortality of your stable - a routine mission played poorly can set you back terribly! Hard West characters have plenty of plot-armor, in addition to the linear skill ramp; if you screw up a mission, no you didn't, and you'll never get more powerful abilities to make sure you did. The result is that you get stuck playing the same mission over and over until you're able to pull it off. This makes the stakes feel pretty low, and the reliance on getting good RNG feels high. Hard West 2 sort of fixes this problem (although the plot-armor problem persists), so if you like the "weird west" setting and turn-based tactical, I recommend that one over this one.

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. There is a game-breaking bug where you cannot move on the map. You can't do anything to resolve the problem other than restart the scenario, and even then, you can still encounter the bug again. The only way to avoid this bug is to play each scenario from start to finish in one sitting.