#532: Hard West
Gunslingers-and-Satan XCOM-em-up
Initial release: November 18, 2015
Platforms: PC, Switch, PlayStation 4
Developer: CreativeForge Games
The old west was a hard place. A vast expanse, stretching hundreds of miles of untamed wilderness — sprawling desert, cragged mountains, dark forests, fetid swamps. But everywhere, people tried to eke out a living, whether it was for gold or silver, or cheap land, or because they lived there before all these white folk showed up. But it wasn’t easy living. There wasn’t a lot out there except hardscrabble wasteland and dangerous people. Such a hostile environment must have seemed cursed, sometimes.
You’ve probably heard of Hard West, if you like strategy games. Billed as a western take on the XCOM formula, it certainly is something like that, with all the attendant difficulty, though there are some fundamental differences on both a macro level and a micro level. But it’s also something else, a grim and unhappy world full of monsters in the guise of men; playable characters include a murderous revenant who sold his soul to the devil for revenge, a sinister Catholic church official who demolishes a scientific collective and murders its members for his own occult purposes, a wealthy adventurer who engineers the slaughter of natives simply so they won’t interfere with his expedition (and that was before he put on the ancient mask that possessed him,) and a fellow cheerfully named Childeater. Curses, massacres, murderers and demons made flesh: the world of Hard West is cruel and unforgiving, and it’s reflected in the gameplay.
The game is divided into eight scenarios (plus a lengthy DLC scenario), each with their own storyline and set of characters. For much of the game, you’ll be moving around a world map, shaped like a diorama of sorts, with locations depicted as tiny models on round bases. Encounters and actions are written as text cards with RPG-like choices. Each scenario has its own conceit, from mining for gold in the opening chapter, “Hard Times,” to an expedition looking for a lost Mesoamerican city in “In Gold We Trust.” Sometimes they come with their own mechanics, such as “Graveyard Shift” having a day/night cycle as well as a requirement to keep your posse fed. Depending on your actions or where you are in the storyline, companions can join or leave the posse; you’ll earn money from encounters and as rewards for combat, which you can then spend in various shops and other ways.
On occasion — about 5 times per scenario — you’ll have combat encounters, during which the game shifts to a familiar, XCOM-like turn-based strategy battle. The basic controls and user interface pretty much are lifted straight from XCOM; but rather than building an army of ultimately faceless, disposable characters, you’ll be fielding a posse of up to four characters. Some are essential and them dying would result in a game over; others are not, but generally will have their own moments in the scenario’s plot should they live. Each can be outfitted with two weapons, two consumables (health supplies, stat buffs, or even thrown weapons,) and one talisman that confers various bonuses, such as a bulletproof vest or a pair of glasses with experimental scopes that improve the character’s aim. In addition to this basic kit, you’ll also gradually collect playing cards over the course of the scenario, each with their own abilities. Slot these abilities into a character and they’ll be able to use them; put the right arrangement of cards into a poker hand and it’ll confer extra bonuses. These abilities range from the Golden Bullet (hit any enemy anywhere, guaranteed) to just straight up cannibalism for health gains.
While Hard West has multiple difficulty settings, even on the easiest, RNG can still catch you out, but enemies have lower health and are therefore easier to dispatch. A major part of the game is Luck, which sort of pulls double duty as a second health bar, and a mana bar. Each character — including enemy NPCs — gets a certain amount of Luck. For every shot that is fired at them that misses, Luck is drained by a number equal to the to-hit-chance of the shot that missed them. In other words, a THC of 30% that misses would remove 30 points of Luck from the target’s total pool. When Luck reaches 0, the next shot, including any that drain it to 0 in the first place, will hit for a certain amount of damage. Damage taken is determined by the amount of cover the NPC is in relative to the shot, as well as the max damage of the weapon. Certain card skills will also drain Luck from the user, adding a further tactical layer. On easier difficulties, THC tends to skew a little higher, and it seems that a 50% chance to hit is indeed a 50/50 shot, as opposed to XCOM in which a 95% chance to hit is closer to a 75% chance to hit.
One annoying thing about Hard West’s combat is that enemies get an overwatch mode of sorts, but your characters don’t. In XCOM, units can be set to automatically take a shot if it sees an enemy move within its field of vision during the opposing side’s turn, albeit with a penalty to hit chance. In Hard West, if you move a unit too close to an enemy unit, the enemy unit will automatically attack with a guaranteed hit. No such ability exists for your characters, though they do have something similar in that enemies will instinctively try to stay outside of a certain range.
To be honest, though, the XCOM similarities begin and end at the combat. XCOM’s strategic layer is a deep, extensive simulation of what it’s like to build and maintain a clandestine military organization — you have to build facilities, staff them, and keep your soldiers kitted out and in good physical and mental condition, all the while trying to keep ahead in an arms race with a hostile alien force that is fielding ever stronger units against you. Hard West trades all that away for a relatively shallow RPG of sorts. There’s no real sense of progression; scenarios can be done in a couple of hours, and then it’s on to the next one, with a different set of characters you have to build up. Despite the game repeatedly using the 2nd person to describe Warren, the ostensible main character of the game (he’s the primary protagonist of three scenarios) there’s a real disconnect between you and these characters; in a sense, it feels like you’re being told a story by the narrator, who so happens to be Death (appearing here as a fantastically gravel-voiced frontier gentleman; there’s almost no other voice acting, other than Libertee, the self-emancipated slave of the “Scars of Freedom” DLC and the mad scientist she confronts. (All this is probably why Hard West 2 decided to go with a more longform narrative with its own cast of characters.) Even the game’s final confrontation does nothing to delve into the individual thoughts of the characters involved despite their playing major roles for multiple scenarios. We get a little more in the DLC as the two narrators play direct roles in the plot, but even that is still just a story being told by the two of them with little focus on anyone else.
Hard West is something of an oddity. While I think it’s sparked a revival of the “weird west” genre, with games like Evil West, Blood West, and, yes, Weird West, having come out since, Hard West intentionally marketed itself as a western-flavored successor to XCOM, rather than on its other merits as a grim horror-flavored tale of murder and madness in the desert. And while it’s certainly a good time as far as turn-based strategy goes, it doesn’t have the same depth; nor will you find much depth to its actual story, with almost no characterization. And yet it’s a compelling, atmospheric little piece of appalling violence, its short-form storytelling at least good for a brief visit to a dark frontier that couldn’t have been much different from the real one.
After all, even the real old west was a kind of Hell.
