Hard West 2
Hard West 2 is a journey to the heart of darkness in the American West. Take control of a supernatural posse and catch the mysterious Ghost Train. Outsmart, outcheat and outgun your enemies in this turn-based tactics game set in a Wild West world where nothing is as it seems.
Hard West 2 is a turn-based strategy, western and turn-based tactics game
developed by Ice Code Games
and published by Good Shepherd Entertainment.
Released on August 04th 2022 is available only on Windows
in 9 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish - Spain, Polish, Portuguese - Brazil, Russian and Simplified Chinese.
It has received 2,703 reviews of which 2,211 were positive and 492 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.9 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 28.99€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified Hard West 2 into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
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Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 (64bit)
- Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E4700 2.6 GHz/AMD Phenom 9950 Quad Core 2.6 GHz
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750/Radeon RX 550
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 35 GB available space
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
The Hard West 2 is really good and fun tactical game and way better than its prequel. My experience with the first game in series wasn't that great, but I went to buy Hard West 2 as I found the Weird Western genre interesting. I was really surprised how much better game Hard West 2 is. So you have a crew, called posse and end up in rather familiar, yet surreal adventure. This is one of those games compared by the press to the XCOM and I get it, but studio behind this didn't tried to make XCOM exactly. Instead they explored about how make combat encounters faster, how to have more enemies on tactical maps, yet keep the pace and not to overwhelm players team. So XCOM is there definitely, but developers wanted to make something else from formula and came up with fast combat, 3 action points for character / turn, which works really well. There are few things to know: Train heists in game are really great puzzles and something different from XCOM where the last mission gave illusion about being in a moving object. There is one issue though. Game dialogue says that shotguns are good for train heists, but shotguns in game cannot target enemies that are higher or lower relative to players characters. Wrong loadout can become a problem when there are guards in train cars and also on roof, on higher level. Other than that, while game makes it possible and rewards player moving fast towards goals on tactical maps, enemy spawning can't keep up with that on some maps. That can lead to frustrating situation, where you end turn and then on next turn couple of enemies have just appeared from thin air on map. I think it might be due to those two factors that Hard West 2 doesn't appear to be huge in turn based tactical scene. In my opinion it should be though. While issues are real, game is rather fast and while I took my sweet time with game doing couple of playthroughs, it can be completed way faster than I did. Other things to mention are that while game improves combat and maps over prequel, environments are still static. No setting things on fire or blowing environmental object up. I didn't find that to be an issue though. Combat scenarios are designed to be rapid and map designs are way better than in Hard West. One mention about items. There different approaches to things. Do we associate enjoyable puzzles with lots of items or what. While I try many kinds of things, between clever and tons of items, you can have one, but not necessarily the other. Hard West 2 doesn't have a ton of items and for me that is part of its appeal. Then there is the story. If prequel was some sort of contemplation about mixing tales of human greed, supernatural and some history, it also didn't had many characters that were relatable in positive sense. Hard West 2 is much more focused, we have just one main protagonist and one crew. While Hard West is still gritty, there are scenarios that I found really hilarious, though not all of that may register to everyone. For me writers went extra mile in this though. Weird Western is niche of niches genre, but while playing I found that it's appeal for me (as European) is about surreal adventure. Mixing something contemporary with something else, makes something possible, like making a Western for people who don't really find Westerns that appealing. I really recommend this game for people who look for something else than XCOM to play. Not because Hard West 2 is so similar, but because it´s different.
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As some negative reviews say this feels more like a puzzle game than an XCOM or something. While there are still hit chances, damage is guaranteed values, there are plenty of 100% accuracy abilities and items, and the luck system lets you ignore miss chances. If you're the kind of person that likes determinism in your tactics this will be right up your alley.
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Don't want to give it a downvote, but all-in-all found the game to be "meh". It's nice enough to scratch the XCOM-itch, but found parts of the game to be far-fetched and/or not fleshed out enough. Main headscratchers (for me) were: * backstories from squad get unlocked gradually, but don't impact the game at all.. what's the point then? * once you find your 'comfort'-attack squad, there's no incentive/reason to switch with the benched ones. Only a handful of mission have a mandatory participant. Maybe introduce fatigue/healing period? * bravado is too broken. I get that this is the HW2 innovation, but battles just become a puzzle, rather than interactive fight. Maybe have it only trigger once/twice? * power level of special moves is unbalanced. Some are too good to bench that squadmember, while others don't really have added value. * don't get why the melee-figther has the same aim as the pistol-expert. Rather than fixed hit-chances (25-50-75-100%), a bit more RNG and differentiation between characters could maybe help? (or is that X-com talking?) * card system is cute, but not fleshed out enough... not sure on how, but surely improvements should be implemented. Didn't feel the need to switch-up much between card-combinations. Finished the game (hard) in under 30h and don't really have an urge for a next playthrough. Closing off with a compliment on the visual style though. Nice work and rooting for a strong 3rd entry of the series!
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Hard West 2 is engaging but a bit different from the first one. Which is normal since it was made by a different studio. All in all, I enjoyed it and think it's a decent addition to any tactics games fan library. But I'd like to pinpoint what I didn't like about the game. My main gripe is the difficulty. The game is balanced around new mechanic Bravado - which replenishes the Action Points after a character kills someone. It's cool as a side mechanic but when everything centers around it the game turns to puzzle. If you want to play it as a tactical game pick Normal or Easy difficulty to avoid frustration. There are some annoying types of enemies which spam new enemies every turn or switch health with your characters when injured. But they're quite rare. Also, the train missions are pain in the ass. Otherwise, the game doesn't overstay it's welcome. The story and characters are okay. The missions rarely drag. There is some exploration. Some nice side quests appear here and there.
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Hard West is one of those deeply niche experiences that I never thought would get a sequel, but I'm happy that it did. Unusually, this time-conscious sequel isn't content to simply be "more Hard West ," but also doubles down on some design decisions from the first game and abandons others to create a thoroughly disparate game experience despite having the same art design and world, likely owing to the franchise being adapted by new developers, Ice Code Games. Unfortunately, this iteration is something of a "two steps forward, one step back" affair. Hard West was already a very cleanly designed game, and Hard West 2 doubles down on "gamey" elements not entirely to its own success. The Basics The DNA that Hard West 2 shares with its predecessor is considerable. Both games are Wild-West "Firaxis XCOM"-alikes, with the standard isometric tactical gameplay, move-and-shoot actions, and contextual, flankable high-and-low cover that have become de rigeur for all games of this pedigree. The major innovation of the first game, for better or for worse, was the "Luck Pool," a kind of shield that could be depleted either by activating various magical abilities or by being shot at. More likely-to-hit shots (like, say, a shotgun flank at extreme close range) would deplete more luck and allow a character to take damage and die, where less-likely shots (like pistols behind cover at extreme distance) would barely tickle the luck pool, leaving the character's health safe. In this way, Hard West was a very nonrandom, "gameable" tactics game, with exact and telegraphed outcomes where the player need never fuss with randomized chance-to-hit. I liked this, but it did render the strategy of the first game somewhat simplistic and very non-simulationist by tactics game standards, with the only "messy" part of the first game's design being its massive array of gimmicky firearms with different gameplay effects. Changes from Hard West 1 Playing Hard West 2 as a veteran of the first one, some of the first changes I noticed were that the firearms array was considerably more streamlined, and the logic of Luck has been retooled entirely: now, XCOM's "chance to hit" is back, in 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% increments, but Luck is used proactively not just to use special character abilities, but also to 'rig' shots to guarantee that they'll always hit. This is a stark departure from the first game where Luck was used reactively to prevent characters from getting shot, and makes the gameplay cadence of this game much more aggressive than its predecessor, something which is reinforced by several characters getting gameplay bonuses when they're out of cover and exposed. It's a design philosophy which mimics the development of Firaxis' own XCOM: Enemy Unknown to XCOM2 : both sequels seem to have independently come to the conclusion that players will only attempt the strictly optimal strategy of inching up the board only taking shots from full cover if given the chance, and so took different mitigating strategies to force players to act aggressively. Where XCOM2 opted for strict mission turn limits, Hard West 2 doubles down on its 'get out of cover and get more accurate shooting' gameyness by having a system called 'Bravado.' 'Bravado' allows a character to immediately regain their full activation upon killing an enemy, further reinforcing the intended aggressive playstyle. However, the game is very balanced around players mastering this feature: enemy counts throughout the game are massive compared to the first Hard West , with some missions pitting the player against an initial onslaught of up to 15 foes all of whom have similar damage profiles and health pools to the player's own characters. Strategic use of Bravado to thin the herd is often the only thing that can prevent the player from getting completely dumpstered in the very first enemy turn, giving Hard West 2 a very prescriptive, very intentional, and very limited gameplay loop compared to the first game, one that often veers entirely out of the tactics genre and straight into doing geometry puzzles. I found this extremely mechanical, 'playing the systems' game loop to be interesting enough to compel me through the game, but it's very different from the first title and I can see why more devoted fans of the tactics-strategy and tactics-RPG genres would feel that this is too much of a departure. The rest of the game is something of a wash compared to its predecessor. The story and characters are better than the first game, but are still fairly bare-bones when compared to tactics-RPGs like the Wasteland franchise, although whether this is a necessary consequence of Hard West 2 's approachable length is a matter one could discuss. The art style is more appealing than the first game's, in my opinion: it's mostly the same style in the same low-fi engine, but features more diverse environments and color choices with less 'let's just slather an old west boomtown in gore and pentagrams and call it a day' laziness. Lastly, the soundtrack is unfortunately a huge step down, substituting in generic, unobtrusive "Wild Westy" motifs to replace Marcin Przybylowicz's powerful Mad-Max-meets-Ennio-Morricone bombast from the first game. In Conclusion At the end of the day, I'd say that like its predecessor, Hard West 2 is a game that you can probably safely skip unless you're a tactics game junkie or looking for material within the underserved horror-western genre niche. It's more polished than the first Hard West , but some of the janky character of that game has rubbed off in the process, leaving a very polished game that's nevertheless more of a horse-drawn carriage than a freight train. An "interesting 7/10" title that would be best purchased on sale.
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 18 November 2024 14:14 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 21 January 2025 01:43 |
| Steam price | 22 January 2025 20:49 |
| Steam reviews | 21 January 2025 07:50 |
Online players
27
Developer
Ice Code Games
Publisher
Good Shepherd Entertainment
Release
04 Aug 2022
Platforms