I grew up with Sierra games, starting from the time they were still under contract with Disney. Yeah, that far back. I've played through all of their major franchises, along with many of the minor ones. But this particular game is one of the worst adventure games Sierra ever put their name on. If you're nostalgic and want to pretend Conquests of Camelot isn't seriously flawed, by all means, mark this as unhelpful. That out of the way, let me recount its sins... 1) The sin of HEAVILY MIXING COPY PROTECTION WITH PUZZLES. Be prepared to flip back and forth between the game manual and the game a few dozen times or more. 2) The sin of HORRIBLY EXECUTED, RAGE INDUCING MINI GAMES. This game wanted to be an action game in places, but Sierra's SGI just wasn't up to the task. Quest for Glory did this much better, and even that game's action sequences pretty rough around the edges. 3) The sin of EXCEPTIONALLY PEDANTIC TEXT PARSER INTERFACE. Yes, worse than the early Space Quest titles. No, the answer to the riddle isn't "lock", are you retarded? It's "A lock", of course. Some adventure gamers, am I right? 4) The sin of COUNTER-INTUITIVE GOTCHA SITUATIONS. I know selling hint-guides was big business in the 80's and 90's but if you've built your game so that they're required, you're not a game designer. You're a huckster. 5) The sin of SLOW, PLODDING, TRIAL-AND-ERROR WALKING "PUZZLES". Having to move your character one pixel at a time with the arrow keys to avoid falling or otherwise dying horribly was a novel way to get a little more mileage out of the AGI engine in 1986. Not so much by 1990. 6) The sin of NEBULOUS, BADLY CONSTRUCTED RIDDLES. There are 5 answers that would correctly answer the riddle, but the designer had one in mind. Time to restore... again. 7) The sin of GIVING YOU PLENTY TO SEE AND DO BUT PUNISHING YOU FOR IT. Don't talk to him, the grail awaits, Arthur! Don't look over there Arthur, don't you care about Camelot?! That'll be 50 Hail Marys, Christy Marx.
I played all the older space sims when they were new, including of course X-Wing and the excellent follow-up, Tie Fighter. If you're reading this, I assume that either you've played Alliance in the past and are wondering about the quality of the GOG port or you, like me, were a fan of the older Lucasarts Star Wars sims but haven't played Alliance. I'll cover both scenarios in this quick review. The GOG release: Good, no problems on modern systems. You're going to want to hack the binary for widescreen/highres support, perhaps add some community mods for better textures and/or models, but the game plays fine as-is. The engine itself though is from the pre multi-core era, thus you may experience a bug where the music will loop endlessly under certain circumstances if you don't pin the CPU affinity to a single core or simply disable the music. X-Wing Alliance in general: Though I spent a lot of time with its predecessors, I didn't get a chance to play this game when it came out. Thus, I don't have the same rose-tinted glasses that others may about it; no nostalgia to add that special spark. What it is happens to be a pretty solid space sim in the same vein as the earlier X-Wing games. Like those there is a lot of attention to detail in how the ships look and behave. For instance, the YT-1300 feels exactly how you'd imagine: faster than it should be but bulky. "Just agile enough" to get you out of those tight spots, and it feels awesome while you're doing it. However, this game isn't all sunshine and roses. Some missions demonstrate how poorly it was play-tested and subsequently polished before release. I won't give any spoilers, but there are several missions where you will be expected to perform within certain criteria, which have already been failed before you even have a chance to intervene... through no fault of your own. Many missions are simply poorly designed, and/or rely on the AI to "do the right thing". Many times it doesn't work out that way. Frustrating.
A boring hipster fantasy set in a boring hipster 1970's world. Buggy, slow-paced, unpolished, and ultimately not fun. There are a hundred games just like this, and Kona has nothing new to say.
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.
