I really like the theory behind this - there are hundreds of stories out there in the Weird West, each just as worth telling as any other - but it lends the game a stacatto feel it doesn't deserve. Some interconnect, some loop back, and there is a Getting The Gang Together throughline, but it means a lot of stopping and starting. Not because of death - more on that shortly - but because the campaign is divided into vignettes, each with their own stars. Which makes it only the more sad that your characters are effectively lost after just an hour or two. Truth be told there aren't quite enough characters or powers available to create too many variations, but nonetheless it's a neat way of making your squad feel yours when visual customisation isn't available. Another is frail but with good range, and who can cast a fatal hex on any enemy in sight - so long as they're not stood in sunlight. I've got, for instance, a guy with lousy accuracy but tons of hitpoints, who carries a shotgun and has a big movement boost so he can essentially run right up to anyone and drop a shell into their spine. You can assign any card to any character, essentially turning everyone into a specialist of your own design, rather than of the game's. For instance, each of your characters isn't saddled with a set clutch of skills, but instead carries 'cards', each with their own constantly active or recharging single-shot power. There's a ton of ideas being thrown around, but admirably buttoned down into logical and coherent controls. The ambition is clearly there, but, I can't help but suspect, the budget was not. Unfortunately the presentation of the game proper can't quite keep up, with the arid lighting, samey art and over-filled text boxes lending it an undeniable air of cheapness. It's playful, in an extremely serious sort of way. Hard West puts the work in to build atmosphere, front-loading its numerous sub-campaigns with apocalyptic morality tales about deals with the devil, survivor's guilt and mysterious strangers, and peppering the mid-mission dialogue with elliptical prophecies from all-knowing hermits and mad soothsayers. So please don't turn up expecting turn-based Red Dead Redemption - though at a pinch, you're getting the Undead Nightmare add-on. The narrative, doomy and dry, offers no shortage of Frontier tropes, though all rapidly tend towards the mystical. It's a testament to the solid, tense combat that Hard West always feels like it's walking its own road even despite this. The meat of the game is really just some men with guns versus some men who sometimes have horns. Its Wild West concept barely has a moment to breathe before it lays the demonic aspect over the top of it, to the point that it might as well have been set in present day Chicago, Belgium's distant future or Dagenham high street on Tuesday, February 10th, 1981. For all the superficial similarities - the percentage chance to hit, the cover system, the permanent fatalities - it's very clearly trying to be its own game. True, we prayed every day for a new X-COM during those wilderness years, but we didn't want the entire genre to be about it. There was a time when 'turn-based strategy' wasn't defined by XCOM, you see. It's a turn-based strategy game with roleplaying elements with cowboys. Point is, this isn't a game about gradually building up a super-squad and a grandiose base in order to take down an almighty, otherworldly threat, but about a small gang of gun-wielders carving or limping their way through more disassociated skirmishes. Demon cowboys, yes, but really they're just cowboys with horns and a flame effect. Much has been made of how Hard West is XCOM-with-cowboys, but if anything it's more like Jagged Alliance.
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