Hard West

Genre: Turn-Based Strategy-RPG / Interactive Story-Driven Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Hard West is a game that pairs Strategy-RPG battles of the XCOM variety with Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style storytelling, with your choices outside of battle deciding how much in funds you have to buy equipment to bring into battle, as well as who will be fighting by your side.

The world of Hard West is fantastically realized here – a somewhat fictionalized version of the Wild West that’s darker, crueler, and beset by fantasy elements that decide the fate of the men and women trying to scrape out a meager existence in the dusty lands you find yourself in. The game starts with a family of settlers preyed upon by bandits, the wife raped and beheaded, and it gets darker from there, with curses, deals with the devil, and the like taking the story to interesting places beyond the typical Western setting.

These supernatural elements actually make for one of the best and more original parts of the gameplay, too – the luck system. Where in most strategy-RPGs luck is situational, consistent, or stat-based, here luck is a commodity like health or ammo, and as such it is constantly in flux based on the events that pass. A bullet misses you one turn, which is good… but that also means you used up some of your luck, meaning you’re less likely to succeed the next time someone takes a shot at you. Get hit or miss your own shot, and your failure will be tempered by knowing you’re even more likely to succeed the next time your luck is rolled.

The game also gives players boons in the form of supernatural cards you can assign to characters between battles, allowing them to do anything from ricochet shots to cannibalizing dead bodies for health, and combining these cards to make poker hands on one character can bestow even greater bonuses. It’s clear there’s a lot of thought that went into this.

Visually, the game looks really good, so long as you don’t mind the color brown. The look really fits the game’s presentation, and environments look sufficiently detailed, yet with some subtle cel-shading that gives it just that slight touch of the surreal.

My main complaint about this game is that at times it’s difficult to tell if you can line up a shot from one point to another, and if you move to check it, you can’t take it back, meaning that you’ll have to waste the second half of that character’s turn moving back. In addition, some of the story-driven changes of fortune that happen seem driven less by anything you did and more by sudden demands of the plot, which cuts down on your feeling of utility as a player. Of course, both of these could be argued as in keeping with the “tough luck” themes of the game, but that doesn’t make them any more palatable.

Still, these are minor gripes about a game that on the whole is an absolutely delightful surprise. Given that the Switch is stuffed full of Strategy-RPG titles right now, it’s an absolute joy to find one that is so wildly original. Fans of Strategy-RPGs, of good Wild West stories, and especially both should absolutely give Hard West a good hard look.

tl;dr – Hard West is an XCOM-style Strategy-RPG that mixes in Choose-Your-Own Adventure mechanics, set in a darker, more supernatural version of the Wild West. It’s not without a few rough edges, but on the whole this is a delightfully inventive take on the genre, well worth a look.

Grade: A-

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2019 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Most Overlooked, Best Strategy Game

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