Hard West 2 preview – turn-based combat with an aggressive slant
If you enjoy games like XCOM, you’ll feel right at home here, even though it’s mechanically a kind of antithesis.
Hard West 2 is an upcoming strategy game filled with gunslingers and hellspawn, and it’s the third game I’ve played this year that’s mixed cowboys and reanimated cadavers and the word “West”, sitting next to Weird West – a slick and smart immersive sim – and Blood West – a good and gory retro shooter. Hopefully, we get a game about herding cattle, called “Lovely West” or something, soon.
If you enjoy games like XCOM, you’ll feel right at home here, even though it’s mechanically a kind of antithesis. Where XCOM is all about covering lines of sight and putting guys in overwatch positions, reacting to enemy movement as you inch towards your objective, Hard West 2 encourages you to push forward and take risks.
This comes in the form of the Bravado system, which replenishes your action points whenever one of your characters gets a kill. Line up a kill shot and you’re treated to the chance to shoot again. In one battle, I manage to get one of my posse onto a saloon rooftop where she’s free to drop five goons in a single turn. It’s a similar system to Gears of War: Tactics, but swap out chainsaw rifles for bolt-actions.
But as in real life, Bravado sometimes comes at a cost. Leave your character in a bad position and it’ll only take a couple of shots to put them down.
The game opens with the gang – Flynn, a specialist in the occult; Laughing Deer, a melee powerhouse; Clive, a quick-witted gunslinger; and Gin Carter, notorious outlaw – chasing down a money train. Filled with federal gold, manned by a skeleton crew, and only ever traveling at night, the locals believe it to be haunted.
When the mission kicks off, your four crew members are galloping alongside the locomotive on horseback. You’re free to move and shoot during your turn, whether mounted or not, and a quick tutorial teaches you the basics of combat. Missed shots generate Luck, which can be banked to improve your accuracy on later turns. Buckshot shoots in a spread, damaging anyone caught in the cone of fire. Trick shots can be aimed at metal barrels, chandeliers, and other objects in the environment to hit enemies around cover with a ricochet. Despite those magic bullets, flanking is still important.
Once you reach the end of the train it sprouts mechanical legs like a robotic centipede from your cheese dreams. You fight some creatures from hell, beat up the devil, and lose your soul in the process. You know, the usual. When you wake up, New Mexico is blanketed in snow. Perhaps the locals were right.
This is another area where Hard West 2 stands apart from XCOM. Instead of launching missions from a base of operations, you roam the frozen wilderness on horseback. In-between combat, it’s reminiscent of an aRPG – a top-down view and an explorable map, much of it hidden by a fog of war until you explore it. There are points of interest to loot, conversation options to choose between, and even characters to recruit, such as a dusty old revenant who you find punching his way out of his coffin.
Once you’ve got your undead teammate, you ride into town to save Laughing Deer from the gallows, and this is where the true Hard West 2 begins. After the tutorial, battles are challenging in the best way. When you lose, it’s always because you overstepped. It’s always due to your own bravado. Every fight sees you wildly outgunned, but smart positioning and target prioritization will win every scrap.
It’s in this fight where you unlock your first couple of special skills, too. Gin Carter gets Shadow Barrage, which allows him to spray up an area in a cone in front of him, fanning the hammer and causing big damage while ignoring cover, shooting through multiple enemies at once. Flynn gets an ability called Shadow Swap, which allows her to swap places with an enemy, slightly damaging herself and them in the process. It’s how I got onto that saloon roof and dropped five goons. It’s great. These recharge after a few turns. Add in consumables such as dynamite and the result is tactical nirvana.
We’ve been a bit starved of these kinds of games the past few years (at least good ones), but Hard West 2 will scratch that tactical turn-based tickle.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.