HARD WEST GRAVES SERIES

These aren’t randomly generated missions, either. But after all that mindless work, one bad move in the ensuing firefight and I had to do it all again (though the second time I just opened fire immediately, which I'm thankful is sometimes an option). Stealth is pretty silly in Hard West, because the guards don’t move from turn to turn, so you can just dutifully click where their vision cones aren’t. In one, for instance, I could sneak around guards freeing three prisoners. And parts of several missions are an absolute bore. I’m not attached to them, I just want them to live so I don’t have to do the whole mission over. The vital characters don’t create a fun sort of tension. Time to start over, as there’s no mid-mission saving. Or, I tried something risky and failed, and there’s no coming back from that.

Because Hard West takes line-of-sight very seriously-to the point of being irritating-I occasionally moved characters into what seemed like a safe position, then watched as an enemy strolled out from behind a building and blasted them in the back. And they're fragile: caught out of cover, most of your gunslingers will eat dirt after one or two hits. Many characters are vital to the story, and must survive. On the default difficulty, Hard West is manageable-I breezed through some scenarios-but everything can end very suddenly. There are guns that can only hold a single shot, and special abilities that require all your action points, so sometimes it’s best to reload, wait until the next turn, and then move into a dangerous position and take a shot-hoping it kills the danger. In Enemy Unknown, needing to reload was an, 'Oh crap, I forgot to reload moment,' but here it's more a part of my planning. Reloading only takes one action point, for instance, so it’s possible to reload and shoot on the same turn, so long as you don’t move.

It’s no clone, though: Hard West differs from XCOM in many little ways, sometimes for the better. There are bunches of stat boosting or usable items to find or buy-poison grenades, doses of opium, magic relics-along with special abilities and weird, experimental guns to pass out to your crew before combat.Ī character’s ‘luck’ depletes when a shot misses them, making it more likely the next will hit. A hungry gunman is weaker, and a cursed or poisoned frontier explorer won’t shoot well at all. (I really wanted that gold.) These are cool little vacations between fights, not nearly as elaborate or gorgeous as something like 80 Days, but interesting for how they affect the turn-based combat, which is really the main act. I also went too far into one crumbling mine and busted one of my character’s hands. At one point, I had the option to build an escape tunnel under my homestead (for a price), which let me sneak in during a combat encounter later on. In one story, my posse-always represented by a skull which floats between locations-wandered the map mining gold while a crime lord siphoned the profits. The stories are a bit banal, cobbled together from the most basic components of the acid western genre-betrayal, lost treasure, pacts with the devil, curses, chapels, and shamans-but their telling is a fun hodgepodge of systems and decisions. The voiced narration is excellent and the writing is efficient.

HARD WEST GRAVES SERIES

Hard West is told in a series of short frontier stories which play out as choose-your-own-adventure-style text prompts on an overworld map, and in XCOM-like turn-based combat scenarios.

Hard west graves