Hard West

Back when I reviewed Secret Ponchos, I went on about how we don’t seem to be getting a whole lot of games that share the Wild West setting. As it turns out, this year, we have at least three of them and sure, they’re not Red Dead Redemption or the older GUN, but a cowboy hat’s a cowboy hat and a six shooter cures most cases of bandititis. Hard West is a turn based tactics game developed by a small indie company called CreativeForge Games, seasoned in Kickstarter’s fires and set in the Wild, or, much rather, Weird West.

Catch a glimpse of trailers or screenshots and I’m certain your mind will wander off towards the time you were saving humanity from an alien invasion in X-Com. It’s true, some may describe Hard West as a lighter version of X-Com, but really, apart from the actual battles the game in question takes a slightly different direction. When you’re not blowing holes into outlaws or madmen, Hard West has you moving a pawn along a boardgame-like map. Here, you visit various locations where you can trade, mine and participate in a series of events by using a choose-your-own-adventure type interface. Yes, the game has a decent amount of text and most of it is quite well written. I’d go as far as saying that the writing and maybe the narrator are the two things that maintain the game’s atmosphere up and running.

The map section is a pretty large part of the game. There’s a chance you’ll actually be spending more physical time on the map, during the game’s 9 scenarios, than in battles. If this is starting to sound disconcerting, don’t fret. The map sections make a very good job of breaking rhythm in between the battles. In this way, tedium rarely sets in. Managing resources tends to become tricky, especially on higher difficulties, as cash won’t always be there in high amounts. On top of the general resource management, certain scenarios will require you to do things such as distributing food rations to make sure your posse is ready for action or even patenting guns and elixirs which, then, become available for use.

When it comes to Hard West’s battles, cover is your best friend and worst enemy. Cover will determine whether or not you’ll go home with a third eye on your forehead or find a new home in the ground. Apart from walls and chest-high objects, the game allows you to open lids or tip over tables to create cover where there previously wasn’t any. It’s a nice addition that allows you to change somewhat of the battle environment, but it never becomes a large factor in combat situations. Every map has three levels of height and, naturally, those in higher positions benefit from a better view of the battlefield. At times, though, it did feel that enemies could see, perhaps, a little too much, managing to hit characters through two buildings and a wall.

The characters in Hard West can be customized quite a bit. They start with a set number of stats which can be changed by using consumables, or adding a trinket to the appropriate slot. Furthermore, the game has a card system where every character has 5 slots for equiping cards. Each card offers stat increases and sometimes abilities. The catch is that, should you get a valuable poker hand (think full house, four of a kind), you’ll get an extra, stronger bonus that’s assigned to that particular hand type. It makes it so you need to juggle the cards in order to maximize the benefits your characters get.

Hard West moves away from X-Com by marking characters that are important to the story as Essential. These characters cannot die, no matter what. Should one of them bite the dust, the battle needs to be restarted from the beginning. If you’ve ticked Ironman mode, you’ll go back to the beginning of the scenario. This is something that will undoubtedly have people torn between loving and hating it. On higher difficulties, you sometimes get pitted against large numbers of enemies, making certain battles feel outright unfair. Should resource or wound mismanagement creep in, expect to reach dead ends where your only hope of progressing will be found in restarting the scenario.

This is aggravated even more by Hard West’s save system which only allows you to load the last checkpoint from your last played scenario. This means that once you start a scenario, you have to also finish it unless you want to lose all your progress. The game tries to play around with a day/night cycle. During the day the tutorial tells you that you can spot enemies outside of your line of sight by looking for shadows. That sounds like an amazing addition, but it’s one that disappears almost entirely after that first opening sequence. Certain times of day provide protection or amplify damage for certain abilities, but they never seem to change anything too dramatically.

Hard West prides itself on its supernatural theme that slowly sets in as the story unravels. While it adds a needed imprint of mystery to the writing, outside of it, it doesn’t do much. You get the occasional Shriek, that damages everyone in a radius around you, or things like Golden Bullets that can travel through cover and have a 100% chance of hitting. The enemies will, however, always act human. Even the few demons that come by now and then are just juiced up versions of human opponents that show no desire to throw fireballs or use anything remotely demonic alongside you. This makes the encounters less varied than they could have been. The only place where the supernatural really feels like itself is during the text-based events.

Prior to starting a scenario, you can tick the Combat Injuries box. This brings a nice little feature that allows your characters to sustain injuries such as mercury poisoning after mining with mercury, or burnt hands after reaching for something at the bottom of a pool of acid. The catch is that, overtime, these injuries harden the characters, implementing a nice risk/reward system. The main problem with this system is that you never get to see too much of it. Hard West’s scenarios are relatively short, having around 4 to 5 battles each and there never seems to be enough time to truly let the healed wounds do their job or experiment with different card combinations. As you lose your items in between scenarios, even when the protagonists are the same, you can’t evade the feeling that the developers maybe tried to have too many things going on at once.

Storywise, Hard West will take you through all the locations you’d expect from saloons, to brothels, to farms, to inns, to crossroads. The decent writing and narrator combined instill an ominous atmosphere. The choices you get to make rarely try to evade your character’s archetype, but you’re never there to turn the rampaging killer into a benevolent saint. You’re there to choose whether he’ll wait a while before he slaughters people or whether he’ll jump right in. And that feels just fine. It’s a good enough rendition of a Weird West world, especially for a small indie studio that’s just setting off.

Hard West’s limitations are most obvious when it comes to its soundtrack and visuals. While the sound effects are fine, the soundtrack is just there filling an empty spot and, occasionally, getting on your nerves. Visually, the game isn’t that far from falling flat. Enemies look mostly the same, with some attention given to coloring their clothes differently. The animations are a bit stiff and some weapons don’t have their own models (I’m looking at you, Musket). From the map, to the interior of buildings everything is coated in different shades of brown. Whatever other colors may be there get quickly drowned into the game’s muddy look while also rendering the adopted cell-shaded style completely ineffective.

Hard West is far from perfect but it managed to keep me playing it until the end. It may not excel in anything, but the combination of atmosphere, tactical combat and character customization were enough to help with overlooking the unimpressive, muddy visuals, the unfairness which, at times, made me feel helpless and its limited save system. It’s a journey through the Weird West that offers both challenge and relaxation while having its own particular type of charm.

MateÈ™ Bogdan Robert, NoobFeed
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