Hard West was a deeply flawed game that, for all of its other faults, absolutely *nailed* the feeling and aesthetic of the weird west with an excellent narrator, moody music, and a series of plots that fit the themes. The writing wasn't amazing, but it did what it needed to do, and their choice of narrator sold it. Hard West 2, then, contains the hardest, most shocking tone-shift in any game I have ever played. We've gone from playing as nobodies with some simple backstories to... I don't know, friggin Back 4 Blood "every character has to be over the top and soooo quirky teehee!" hero shooter nonsense. Every line by every character (except Bill, who is the "lone sane man" type of character) is aggressively overacted. They quip at you when their turn comes up, they say something when you're moving on the overmap, there's little quips during dialogues - and it's all steaming turds. The meathead Native American Warrior dude will talk about all the colors of the wind and dances with wolves, eat your heart out. Gin has a line something to the effect of "I thought this was the Hard West, not the Deadlands!", and so on. It's painfully generic, from the writing to the delivery. I wish I could turn it off. On the overmap, we've swapped from a second-person style of storytelling (as the first game was narrated by Death, meaning all of the text is from his point of view, not the player character's) to Gin talking about things in first-person, like in a diary... if that diary was written by a teenage girl writing her first fanfic. It compounds the tonal whiplash coming from the first game. I gave the game two hours to woo me and get me past the tone-shift and it couldn't stick the landing. Gameplay is dramatically improved from the original in interesting ways, as are visuals. But the writing and aesthetics are legitimately just THAT bad that I couldn't stomach any more of it. Worst sequel I've played in a long, long time.
The good things: it's gorgeous, sounds good, the setting of Eora is interesting and you actually get to see an interesting area of the world rather than Dyrwood's "diet Forgotten Realms." There are more scripted "pick an option" events throughout the world and they're always fun. Exploring the world map feels almost like FTL in a lot of ways, but this is also a downside - see below. The bad things: Dude, where to begin? Combat is trash. It's improved from the first game, but a shiny turd is still a turd. There's no complexity or depth or any kind of thought that goes into combat because terrain is irrelevant and just for show. There's no high ground/low ground mechanics, no system of taking cover or using cover, and every battlefield is just a plain open field. All of the battles are just "hit them harder than they hit you" and forms of hard CC are largely removed from the game so it's mostly just a bland slugging match. There's no strategy, no tactics. And you're made to fight through 90% of the game, with only specific encounters giving you the option of talking your way through. Gameplay balance is terrible, even worse than Pillars was. Obsidian cut corners and it shows. Paladins and Rogues break the game and Paladin/Rogues can quite easily solo the entire game without even trying. Exploration is awesome, but also extremely shallow. There's no sense of cost or threat to exploring and literally everything involving the ship and its mechanics feels half-assed - expected of a stretch goal. It's frustrating because it's not hard to see how amazing it COULD be if Obsidian bothered to give a crap - or was competent enough to pull it off. I backed this game on Fig and I probably should've learned my lesson the first time, when Pillars turned out to be garbage. I've learned my lesson this time, though, and will be avoiding Obsidian products in the future. They clearly don't know how to make decent RPGs anymore.
Hollow Knight is probably the most beautiful game I've played in years, both in terms of art and sound design. It's dripping with atmosphere and exploration is an absolute joy. However, it's hamstrung by some utterly amateurish high-level design choices that frequently took me out of the game and made me question whether it was really worth forcing myself through it. UItimately, I'm glad that I did, but it doesn't change the fact that those 4's and 5's are utterly undeserved and are probably from people writing a review fresh after beating the game, or are from people that are only a few hours in. The map is one of the worst I've seen in any game of this type, and when you have environments as expansive as HK's (much moreso than in Axiom Verge, Guacamelee, or any of the other classic metroivanias), it's a serious issue. Having to use a charm slot (what pass as your character upgrades, since there's no equipment or anything like that - HK is an excessively simple game) just to have a functional compass is one of the most asinine desigtn choices I've ever seen in a metroidvania, and it's just the tip of the iceberg. I suppose HK's biggest sin is that it doesn't really do anything interesting with its gameplay. It's simplistic, to an excessive degree, and that's exhibited in its simplistic combat (which the game focuses heavily on - it leans more towards your Castlevanias than your Metroids.) You get one weapon, with one set of animations, and that's it. There are no defense or attack stats you track, or anything like that. That's fine for those "casual art house" metroidvanias that were popular in recent years (like Dust and Ori), but HK clearly wants to be a "Dark Souls tough" experience without any of the elements that resulted in people replaying those games dozens of times. For $15 it's still a pretty good deal if you like Metroidvanias, but don't believe those 5 star ratings - they're a complete crock. This game's a 3.5 at best.
Better than I expected for the price. It appears to be made by an Asian outfit, so the translations can be a little bit Engrish-y, but in a way it sort of adds to the charm. It's not a humorous game, but it's also not one that takes itself too seriously. Unlocking characters seems to be pretty excessively grind focused (is that a platinum symbol? As in I need 5000 thousands gold pieces???), but the starting character is a great all-rounder and you can unlock a dedicated mage character fairly easily. Roguelite elements mostly consist of being able to spend gold on permanent upgrades (extra XP from kills, extra gold from pickups and so on), starting the game with some items, or starting the game with a god's favor. The gods all change the game to favor a particular playstyle, and have to be found in the dungeon as statues before you can use them in subsequent runs. I can't say much about the game's balance, and I wouldn't expect any balance issues to get fixed if they exist, but it's a pretty good value for the money and I lost almost four hours to this game without hardly a blink. The only way to make this game better would be to make it mobile-friendly. I'd love to have this on my little Chromebook :(
HLD is a fantastic game and is a great buy for $20. It's probably the clear contender for indie game of the year for 2016 and I'll be surprised if there are many other products that can even challenge it for that title. It's a beautiful game with smooth gameplay and superb sound design. But it isn't perfect. HLD has almost no text anywhere - this is allegedly a call back to the SNES era of games, where there was little to no spoke dialogue, but A Link to the Past is cited as a direct influence on the game's design yet had NPC dialogue and explanations of what's going on. So take their claims with a grain of salt. The game doesn't really have any sort of real narrative, and while this doesn't necessarily hurt the game, neither does it help it. For me, though, the biggest issue I found was the combat itself. Many attacks, especially from bosses, can knock the player down, but you aren't invulnerable while knocked down. So you can be knocked off your feet, unable to take any action, and then take MORE damage while still unable to do anything about it! With the player's very low health pool, this can very frequently result in "unavoidable" deaths. Instead of making a mistake and then taking a bit of damage for it, you make a mistake and then take a bit of damage for it, then a few bits more damage, and suddenly you're dead and have to spend 20 seconds waiting for the game to reload and let you try again. If they planned on making death so frequent and outright CHEAP, they could've at least gone the Hotline Miami route and made respawning almost literally instant. The game's final boss is the worst offender and was frustrating more than fun. I felt like the player and boss both desperately needed mercy invincibility... something that was a core mechanic in the 8-bit and 16-bit games Heart Machine cites as influences for HLD, yet is conspicuously absent here. Still, overall an excellent game.
Hard West is a very interesting game that feels quite a lot like Deadlands meets XCOM, and the atmosphere and theme are fantastic. The gameplay WOULD be fantastic, except while copying almost all of XCOM's basic formula (two actions per turn, attacking ends turn, light vs heavy cover, etc), they left out the most important element: overwatch. In both XCOM and Hard West, the player is nearly always outnumbered, and often quite substantially so. It's rare to have a posse of more than three or four characters, yet you're often stacked up against ten or more foes, all of who use weapons just as deadly as yours, and your characters rarely have more than 1 or 2 HP advantage. This basically means that if you get flanked (since all attacks within 5 tiles automatically hit, and for full damage if you aren't benefiting from cover), you're going to lose someone. And since you're outnumbered, there are going to be situations where you simply have to accept getting flanked, or spend the next five turns whittling away their Luck so you can do 1 damage, and repeat until they or you finally die. It's not particularly interesting, and is actively frustrating most of time. Wait, I said overwatch was gone? I'm sorry - I meant the PLAYER doesn't get overwatch. Your enemies sure do! If they don't use all of their AP, they automatically enter overwatch at the end of their turn, taking an attack of opportunity against any unit that entires their red circle (which is always no more than 5 tiles, meaning the AoO always connects, and for full damage.) It results in a game that's more tedious and frustrating than fun. I'm really hoping the developer realizes this and just patches in automatic overwatch for the player, otherwise I just can't recommend this game. It's unfortunate, too, because I love the CYA-like overworld segments and adore the game's atmosphere.