Hard West

I definitly cannot agree to other reviews here - the game has a surprisingly fair and innovative combat system for this kind of game (and I am also X-Com fan). It might not be as complex as those other games but it is really good. The atmosphere is good though I would have wished for more spoken dialogues and less written text windows. The battles are tactical, solid and sounds and graphics are quite atmospheric supporting the dark mystical wild west stories of the campaigns. Sadly it lacks a bit the sandbox aspect, which you wish for and at some point I just wanted to go on playing the campaign when it ended... well overalla well made game with one bad technical problem: For me it had a memory leak leading to 6GB+ of RAM usage over the course of hours and to sudden lags increasing steadily up to 15 seconds at which point you will decide to restart the application and it works again fine. Still that is not a showstopper but definitly gets me almost down to 3 stars. But I decided to vote for 4 as it was fun to play and the really good combat system deserves it.

As a fan of X-Com games I really appreciate combat in this game (definitely not worse than in X-Com). What degrades the game for me is annoying behaviour outside of combat (strategic/map view). The map view should serve for story but feels like meaningless rolling of dice. Moreover it takes ages of your time. Any change in "dialog" takes 5 seconds (wait 5 sec>you have option to click "next">another 5 sec>select one answer>wait 5 sec>click next>...). If you are returning to the same town/encounter you want to do it quickly not spend minute of waiting. I was even forced "to be merchant" to progress in game! Game forced me to find which merchants sells cheaper and to who should I sell in order to progress further... I hated that slow menus and I even had to make notes what to buy where and to who to sell it in order to earn enough to progress in game... so annoying! The tactical/combat part of the game is very good and I would recommend it but the amount of wasted time outside of it kills most of the fun. So sad... this could be easily 4.5/5 game.

Decent looking game. Not fun to play though. Their version of Turn based stealth movement may be the most ridiculously stab yourself in the head with a screwdriver exercise as i am trying to move around to find a key. I'm glad i bought it on sale. Played for about an hour before i gave up.

Title might be a tad unfair, especially since I am giving it a pretty high score (Although I would like to give it a 3,75 if only I could), but I suppose it is simply impossible to have tactical missions that so closely mirror the style of X-COM without their depth and come out perfectly fine. What I like about Hard West is its world-building. A Wild West full of gunslinging heroes and villains (mostly villains) dabbling in demonic powers, the devil walking the earth to charm fools into doing his bidding and a few good souls trying their best to stem the tide. Excellent soundtrack and narration really pull you in much in the way they do in Darkest Dungeon and that alone was enough for me to look past the mediocre and too few inbetween tactical missions (which are usually pretty easy but do at least tie into the story). The gameplay itself is divided between a scenario map where there are different changes in objectives, not so much mechanics, each time. You travel around from location to location, make a few choices to get what you need and it's all very nicely fluffed out for what it is. A smooth-talking personification of our moral end helps give critical moments in the story quite a bit of extra oompf, so that's appreciated. So presentation and style were top notch, but as for the actual story within this really cool setting they cooked up... well, it's presented in several shortish scenarios where you change characters each time and while it's not awful, it doesn't exactly tread unknown territories, if not to say outright it feels pretty flat at times. There's also no divergent paths and thus little replay value. One might think I am perhaps too generous with those four stars but I did get it during a sale and enjoyed my time with it more than I thought I would so I suggest you try and wait for one as well.

The game uses the XCOM reboot formula, which seems to be the new standard for modern turnbased tactical combat games. The big difference here is that the game has a luck mechanic instead of overwatch, so characters can't sit out a fight forever in good cover but need to change posititions more often. On the downside tactical planing and cover become less important, and makes the game feel even more casual than the XCOM reboot. And despite beeing a game with a relative strong narrative, the characters have less personality than those of similar games. The campain map and rpg options are also totally boring. Graphics are nice but blurry.