Some missions start out as ‘Stealth Missions’ meaning that combat has not yet begun and you can move your team into position before going all Yul Brynner. I can plan for that! It’s still randomised, but it feels fair. You get something for missing – it’s no longer all-or-nothing – if you miss you strip your target’s luck so that your next shot is far more likely to hit. No more losing the game because you missed three 90% chance shots in a row, no more losing the game because an NPC hit two 10% shots in a row. What this means for me is no more rage, the game feels fair. Being unlucky three times in a row is virtually impossible. What this means in practise is that being unlucky twice in a row is far less likely. If a shot misses a particular character their luck is depleted (equal to the percentage chance of the shot), when they are hit their luck refills. Luck is a resource/stat which all characters have (both player and NPC) and which influences that character’s chance of being hit. The innovation that makes me want to kiss the dev’s hems is the addition of ‘luck’. All lovely additions, giving the game a firmly wild west feel, but not really game-changers.
STEAM HARD WEST SERIES
Most of the twists are thematic, you can fan your pistols for a series of rapid but inaccurate shots, you can kick things like tables over for cover, you can ricochet your bullets off certain objects to shoot round corners (very cool!) and so on. Action is turn based, you control a group of characters each of which has action points that can be spent on movement or performing actions (shooting, reloading, using skills or consumables), so far so XCOM. Missions will be familiar to anyone who’s played XCOM or anything in a similar vein, though the game introduces a few smart twists. I suspect these narrative arcs will converge at some point (this is not a spoiler, I’m only 5 or 6 hours in, I’m just guessing!) and I’m really looking forward to that happening. Each campaign has you playing as a different character with minor, though interesting, mechanical changes to how the game plays. Gameplay is split over eight campaigns each of which consists of a series of missions making a complete narrative arc. They could’ve just made it gritty, tried to accurately represent the hopelessness and desperation of frontier life, but this fantastical, mythical retelling is so much more emotive.
STEAM HARD WEST FULL
Using occultism and existential horror to symbolise the very real but mundane horrors of the old West is a smart move in a game full of smart design choices. It’s the old West with a darkness bubbling under the surface, hinted at early on by chance encounters with creepy strangers and little eruptions of evil suggesting things are rotten beneath.
I was worried that the occultist aspects might be overplayed but, so far at least, the blending is deft.
I’ve never been particularly enamoured of wild west settings in games (or anything else) but Hard West’s American frontier with occultism and lovecraftian insanity (or as the game’s Steam description puts it, “supernatural chaos”) drew me in immediately.
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