Hard West

I wasn't sure at first about this one. I wouldn't call "strategy" games my first love in gaming, even though I did play a lot of Dune, C&C, WarCraft and StarCraft back in the day. I am glad though that I gave this one a try; especially for the sale price. This is a great game, nice look and feel and the overall style, including the narrative, really works well in my opinion. The mechanics and controls are smooth, although I wish the game would recognize my mouse buttons a little better. Using card decks for skill/perk assignments is a very nice idea that fits well within the western theme and what you would expect. The game is challenging, and while some people have said it's not very big, for someone like me with little time, it's a great game to just jump into and play a map here and there. I do agree with one statement that it is pretty taxing on the GPU. On average any recent game will usually have my GTX 660Ti at about 154 F (68 C) or less (incl. GTA V). This game, however, will make it go up as high as 168 F (76 C) -- idle temperature is about 86 F (30 C). That isn't a problem, and cards can handle that kind of temperature without issue, but it is certainly an interesting fact to note. While the game looks good, you wouldn't expect it to be this demanding on a GPU. Either way; if you like westerns (with a side of the supernatural), and if you enjoy some good tactical gaming with style and choices to make, then look no further. Especially on sale this is a steal!

As many others have mentioned, Hard West plays a lot like XCom or similar tactical games. There are some interesting gameplay mechanics which give this game its own unique feel, so that's not really a negative. The narration is good, the art style is interesting (even if the visuals in particular scenes / environments don't always gel 100%) and generally comes across as "small studio polished" in look and feel. Now, the negatives... You knew this was coming. Hard West is buggy, and I mean BUGGY. In the ~5 hours I've spent playing this game, I've had at least a dozen crashes, twice as many glitches and graphical artifacts, and experienced countless less detrimental bugs that jolt the player out of the game's atmosphere. After the Nth time I managed to do well on a particularly hard fight (you can't save during combat) only to have the game crash or bug out AFTER my victory, leaving me to either replay the scenario YET AGAIN or quit playing, I've finally learned my lesson and opted for the latter. If the developers decide to seriously support their game and patch these game-breaking flaws, it really is a fun experience. Until then, if it EVER happens (Indie studios rarely seem to support their projects after they go gold these days), I'd avoid Hard West. Right now it's a lot less like an old west train heist, and more like a train wreck.

While I got to say the game has a great atmosphere, good art style, and good writing, it has major draw backs. For one lack of overwatch is absolutly annoying, enemies will run right passed you and there is jackshit you can do about it. I will say the A.I. is really good at depcting how a dumb ass backwater inbred yokal would act when given a shot gun, becuas 15% of the time the enimes will just use one AP to charge right at you, stop in the middle of the room not even trying to find cover, and flank you with a 20 gauge hello. The lack of check points is also really annoying, having to start from the beginning if you fuck up at the end of a mission you'll go back to the very start of the mission which wastes 30 mins of your life, and that's only if you fuck up and the game doesn't (I had a PC get stuck in cover while moving meaning I couldn't skip turn, I needed to retart the fucking level). I feel like this is someone's first game that had a lot of heart put into it but not enouph experince to pull it off as well as it could have been.

Hard West is an incredibly good tactical shooter, with a couple of faults that made it too hard for me to finish. Most of the game is spot on: good UI, beautiful graphics, a solid story line, lots of contents, random events, etc. The problem comes from quite long tactical maps with no saving nor intermediate checkpoint whatsoever. That, together with the high mortality rate of all the characters (included the main one), makes the game at time extremely frustrating. And the lack of overwatch is unfortunately heavily felt. Nevertheless, a very solid pleasant game with clean mechanics and a lot of character. I like it, 75/100 for me.

This game has an unpatched game-breaking bug in its second scenario. If it occurs, then your saved game has become corrupted, all of your progress will be lost and you will have to restart the whole game again and hope the bug doesn't occur for you the next time. When the bug occurs, you get a black screen instead of having the final mission of the second scenario load like it is supposed to do. In 2018 on their Steam forum, the devs were quoted talking about this issue. They acknowledged that the bug exists, and said they weren't going to fix it while working on their next game, Phantom Doctrine. They also promised to fix it *after* they finished Phantom Doctrine. Phantom Doctrine was released in August 2018, and I am writing this review in April 2023, after I have experienced this game-breaking bug; because contrary to their promise, the devs *never* came back to Hard West 1 in order to fix the bug. It's still present. Another major issue with this game: it made my 2080 GPU's fans spin so fast that they sound as loud as a vacuum. But the graphics for this game are not that great, and the characters are not very detailed from a visual perspective, so there is no good reason for why it should be heating up my GPU to toaster-like levels, even though it does. If you can get past all the issues I just mentioned, then Hard West 1 is a decent Xcom imitator. It's not as deep as Xcom, and it lacks the variety of weapons and enemies and tools that Xcom has, but it can still be fun. One thing Hard West 1 does very well is to have a devil character provide voice-over narration frequently as you are in the middle of playing through missions. This voice actor does a perfect job of playing a calm, cool, collected devil. I don't know how to rate this game, because if you experience the game-breaking bug, it's a 0/5. But if you don't experience the bug, or if you replay the game after you experience it and then it doesn't occur, then the game is perhaps a 3.5/5.