The western and horror genres go together like peanut butter and chocolate. I’m not usually a western person, but throw in a supernatural twist and I’m all in. Monsters on the frontier? The dead coming back to life in an abandoned town? Sign me up. A fantastical element is oftentimes the best way to accentuate the traditional elements of the genre, and it works perfectly for this combination. 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.
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. After a fateful card game, you all lose your souls and are scattered to the winds. Following that dramatic opening, you slowly rebuild your party, finding old friends and new allies, and head out to hunt down Mammon.
Battles play out like a standard post-XCOM tactics game with a few unique mechanics to spice things up a bit. 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. 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. 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 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.
Far and away the most impactful addition to the formula is Bravado. In Hard West 2, when a character kills an enemy, all their action points are returned to them, giving them an additional turn. This can be chained as long as you can keep killing, leading to some hugely empowering moments. 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. Bravado completely changes the way you look at an encounter, but not without causing some issues to the game’s balance.
Hard West 2 is hard, but differently so than other tactics games like XCOM. Because you’re able to chain kill enemies so effectively with Bravado, the game throws a large number of enemies your way. 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. 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. On the default difficulty of “Hard,” the amount of damage they do to you is fairly high, making mistakes in shootout brutally punishing. 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. For example, in other tactics games, bleeding usually does a set amount of damage per turn, but in Hard West 2 it does a set amount of damage per action, compounding its effects. While you can apply these statuses to enemies as well, it feels much harsher to the player characters.
A high number of enemies would work better for me if there was a bit more variety, but there aren’t a ton of meaningful variations within the game. Most of the ranged enemies feel pretty similar, only switching up their damage and HP, and the melee enemies are fairly basic. There are a couple special variations, but many of them end up feeling a bit punishing. Revenants will regenerate HP at the start of their turn, so it’s really not worth attacking them unless you can kill them outright. Witches have the ability to summon two revenants on their turns, amping up the already challenging enemy numbers. There’s also a mysterious spellcasting enemy that does an absolutely devastating attack that I can’t quite figure out, healing itself and taking nearly 75 percent of my character’s HP in one attack.
Hard West 2 features a set cast of characters that you’ll take through the campaign of the game. Each of them has a special ability that can be upgraded throughout, as well as different bonus traits that are unlocked. Laughing Deer, who has boosts to melee combat, has one of the most satisfying abilities, allowing him to sprint across the level and do more damage depending on how far he traveled to his target. When upgraded, it has the ability to apply the dazed status to enemies within a certain area of effect at the end of the attack. Other powers include decoys, swapping places or shooting through walls. While I would have loved more abilities per character, their short cooldowns make sure that it becomes an important part of their arsenal.
Rather than relying on traditional XP progression for the characters, the game instead rewards you with playing cards that can be equipped to a character’s “hand.” Each card gives an individual stat boost, like speed or HP, and the tier of your poker hand determines how many of your traits are unlocked. You can swap these cards around as much as you want, but there’s never any indication going into a mission of what kind of threats you might be facing, making it hard to tailor your upgrades to any sort of planning. I mostly found myself using my same favorite characters with the same hands throughout, finding useful ways to synergize certain skills. A few of the traits don’t feel worth it, even at higher levels, but it’s a thematic system that helps sell the world of the game.
Between missions you spend your time moving around a map, visiting towns and fulfilling various side quests. Because you have a set cast of well-sketched characters, this is more compelling than I thought it would be. Side quests don’t involve combat, but do provide characterization for everyone in the party, sometimes asking you to pick a side between two people, boosting your bond with them in the process. As you increase your bond, the character will both gain skills and give you an opportunity to chat with them about their backstory, providing you story and mechanical incentivization to build relationships with them. All of the action of the side quests are text based, but the writing is solid, making it just as satisfying as a well-timed Bravado streak. The rewards of these extra missions can be substantial, so there’s no reason not to engage with them. You’ll need the extra money, because many of the healing items you receive are one-time use, especially in the early game. Eventually you acquire reusable healing kits, but even those don’t seem powerful enough to swing the battle.
Each mission is handcrafted, unlike XCOM’s focus on procedurally generated missions, creating some really great setpieces. Even when I’m having issues with the combat balance, the set dressing of the combat encounters is creative and thrilling. Fighting your way through a train car, jumping onto a horse and galloping to another train while fighting off enemies from all angles is a spectacle to behold. There’s even a really clever mission that takes place in a dream, playing level layouts in a trippy fashion. Thankfully, even with the focus on challenge, there’s no permadeath for your characters, keeping them all in play throughout the whole campaign, as long as you can afford healing.
There are some small nagging technical issues that popped up for me that didn’t hurt the overall experience, but showed a slight lack of polish. Bugs like sound effects dropping out or starting in windowed mode kept happening to me throughout my time with the game. Animations also can feel a bit lackluster. For example, there’s a generic eating animation for all healing items, which works fine for a can of beans but looks silly for a bandage. It doesn’t fully pull me out of the game, it’s just a series of small things that add up over time.
If you’re a fan of tactics games, there’s a lot to like in Hard West 2. It’s got a ton of personality, and the Bravado mechanic really does change the way you look at the battlefield. The focus on aggression keeps everything in line with a high-octane wild west shootout, merging gameplay with theme effortlessly. The core loop of the combat is engaging enough to push through the often wild spikes in difficulty. I found myself bouncing back and forth between Hard and Easy depending on the mission and still had to do a lot of save scumming to get through. Based on Steam posts, it seems the developers have been listening to the community and have a balancing patch in the works, so hopefully they are able to smooth out some of the rough edges.
Hard West 2 is available now on Steam.
