Once enemies start doing status effects to you later in the game, it gets doubly challenging, as many of these effects don’t feel balanced. On the default difficulty of “Hard,” the amount of damage they do to you is fairly high, making mistakes in shootout brutally punishing. If you don’t see the route through, you’re just stuck with a ton of bad guys that will chip away at your health very quickly. This makes the game into a bit more of a puzzle game, since finding the correct pattern to kill your enemies is essential to surviving. Because you’re able to chain kill enemies so effectively with Bravado, the game throws a large number of enemies your way.

Hard West 2 is hard, but differently so than other tactics games like XCOM. Bravado completely changes the way you look at an encounter, but not without causing some issues to the game’s balance. There’s a real joy to be found when you can work out the correct order of operations to allow three members of your crew to weaken an insurmountable looking group of enemies, setting up the final one to tear through them like paper. This can be chained as long as you can keep killing, leading to some hugely empowering moments. In Hard West 2, when a character kills an enemy, all their action points are returned to them, giving them an additional turn. It’s a great way to get a better angle on the enemy, even if many of the levels don’t exactly set up for these shots in too many meaningful ways.įar and away the most impactful addition to the formula is Bravado. Cover is a big part of the game, but some weapons allow you to do trick shots, which bounce bullets off objects in the environment. It’s not quite as impactful as the developers may have intended, but it’s a nice little addition that can help you turn the tide of battle. Any time you miss or get hit, you collect a resource called luck, which can be cashed in to help boost your chance to hit at a crucial moment. Following that dramatic opening, you slowly rebuild your party, finding old friends and new allies, and head out to hunt down Mammon.īattles play out like a standard post- XCOM tactics game with a few unique mechanics to spice things up a bit. After a fateful card game, you all lose your souls and are scattered to the winds. Hard West 2 starts with one hell of an opening: you and your crew are doing a classic train robbery, hopping on and off of horses in the process, when the train transforms into a monstrous centipede-like creature piloted by a devil named Mammon. Early this year Weird West had great success in the immersive sim space with this blending of genres, and now Hard West 2 takes it to the tactics genre, with some unique twists that set it apart from its contemporaries, though not without its rough edges. A fantastical element is oftentimes the best way to accentuate the traditional elements of the genre, and it works perfectly for this combination. Monsters on the frontier? The dead coming back to life in an abandoned town? Sign me up.

I’m not usually a western person, but throw in a supernatural twist and I’m all in. The western and horror genres go together like peanut butter and chocolate.

Tv tropes hard west