Hard West

I thought this game would play out more like XCOM in that you follow a linear narrative and recruit/improve characters as you went along. That would have been fun, to have an XCOM-style game with the aesthetics of the Wild West, but instead what the game turned out to be was a segmented storyline similar to what an RTS would do. If you've ever played Warcraft 3 or Age of Mythology (or presumably the Starcraft series), you probably know what I'm talking about. While the missions (scenarios) are longer than those of an RTS game, they are still relatively short and all progress with your characters (gear, money and wounds-turned-useful-scars) is lost when you start another scenario to continue the story. It's not a deal-breaker, the game is still fun and I haven't even finished it yet (three scenarios done with about five or so hours of continuous gameplay), but instead of forcing the character to play pre-determined characters with names and backstories, it would have been even better to follow a narrative that let you build up your own story as well. The story's interesting, though, and would have still been worth keeping even if it had been changed more towards my personal preference, but having more text-based story content would have increased the length of the game while still being a lot of fun, much like what the Shadowrun series does. As for gameplay, like other reviews have noted, overwatch doesn't exist in this game. Even Shadowrun has overwatch, but enemies in this game are the only ones who get it and if you get within the red circle around them (it'll show up if you hover over a tile close enough) they'll take a free shot at your character. Fights sometimes drag on because the equipment you're carrying doesn't do much damage and some enemies have higher health (doing 1 damage per turn gets old when accuracy is so low). Anyway, while it isn't perfect, it's fun. I feel like I won't play it again for a while until I want to relive the story.

Great game if you like the intitial concept. The Lack of Overwatch and *Spoilers* narrative is a serious downfall for this game in the second chapter. Immediatly you have to sell your soul regardless of your choices makes the entire first chapter and the moral questions I asked myself while doing these things completly meaningless. It could have been a great game about, loss, hardship and temptation but it got quickly boiled down to revenge and Satan narrative, which stoppped me from progessing past the second chapter. It left a very bad taste in my mouth. Good game mechanically if you can overlook the lack of overwatch which is a huge down point since its often a detrement to shoot at long distance and you often c an't hit people due to the addmitly weird angles in this game.

I wanted to wait with writing a review until I finished the game - but I have to face the truth: I'll never finish it. It's not worth my time. Maybe it would be a better game if it were shorter, but it just goes on and on. It has enough plot for the lenght, but not enough varied gameplay. The basic premise is solid and I didn't notice that many bugs. My main problem is the reverse difficulty curve that occures in every single chapter: Every time you start weak guns, few resources and few party members. That means you have to carefully position yourself, plan a stealthy attack an maneuver yourself into favourable positions. The first mission in each chapter is the hardest - sometimes infuriatingly so, since you can't save during missions. Then it all goes downhill: You can quickly buy better weapons, you find additional party members, level up, but the missions don't seem to get harder. By the last mission you can just methodically gun down one enemy after another without much effort. It goes from infuriating to boring. There are some new enemy types on special occaisions, but they hardly have much of an effect, I didn't really care for the overworld map gameplay too. You get to make a lot of choices, but you can't really make estimates about the final results, so it's more or less guesswork. I wonder if they really do have an effect on the story, or if the game just fools you into thinking they do. All in all, it's not a bad game, but a rather dry one. It does nothing particularly well and doesn't know where to stop.

As others have said unbalanced mechanics make this game tedious. I had an enemy shoot me through a building wall and floor while I was behind cover. Wouldn't recommend until it has more polish. The artwork is well done and the voice acting is also enjoyable. When you are not shooting, turn based xcom style, it primarily consists of traveling around a marker map until you have satisfied the requirements to trigger an event. Give yourself a test and go through the tutorial level without the actual tutorial tips. If you enjoy the tedium of memorizing a map, as they are not procedurally generated, and enemy movements then this game may be for you. But in terms of actual tactics it's quite frustrating that the enemies are so numerous and whether you are hit or not, is based on an arbitrary luck score as opposed to cover.

Hard West is a bit of a mixed bag. The turn-based combats are quite good, even though it lacks a few features that I am used to from other similar games (for example there is no overwatch for your characters, only for enemy characters). However, there are also unique features, such as the richochet skill which lets you bounce a bullet of one or more object when there is no direct path to an enemy (a skill which I must admit I never made use of) and the luck mechanic which makes you less likely to be hit if you were hit recently. There are three difficulty levels, so it should be possible to adapt the difficulty to your skill level. The game is of a decent length, consisting of eight different scenarios, each consisting of a few battles and a kind of choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) gameplay in between battles. Instead of leveling up characters there is a system where you can add new abilities to the characters and boost existing abilities by equipping different cards that you find. I would have preferred a more traditional system of leveling up characters, e.g. like in XCOM, but the card system has some things to be said for it (e.g. you can rearrange the cards between battles to optimize your team for the next battle). The story was alright, but it felt a bit like it was trying too hard to be dark. and consequently there are few if any really likeable characters. The weakest aspect of the game is the CYOA gameplay between battles, which consists of travelling to different locations on the map and choosing between a few different possible actions at each location, where the choices made can affect e.g. how much money you make and whether you receive some injuries or not. This was handled more creatively in some of the scenarios than in others but on average this aspect of the game was not all that fun. Overall, I think the game is worth playing for fans of turn based tactical strategy games, although there are much better games in the genre (e.g. the XCOM games).