Ready your turn-based six shooter...
The difficulty in designing a turnbased game is that the little details have to perfect in order for it to stand out from the crowd. With plenty of time to digest what’s happening, and with an intelligent approach the best means of success, the player has every incentive to fully understand even the most unassuming of design choices. It’s not a genre that allows developers to hide from their audience. Everything contained within that digital packet will be picked up, spun around and observed in extreme detail.
It’s a shame that developer CreativeForge opted for turn-based tactics specifically because of that relentless observation their game opens itself up to. On the surface Hard West has everything you’d want and realistically expect from a game that embraces the tough-as-nails Western setting: personal tragedy, unrelenting hardship, callous evil and an aesthetic that channels the visual tone of everything from The Searchers to A Fistful of Dollars, Unforgiven to Django Unchained.
Things even take a supernatural turn, doing much to add diversity to what can otherwise be a difficult setting within which to sustain interest after 10 hours or more or playing time.
While the early going is good, thanks in large part to a well-paced chapter system that sees you take the reins of a wide selection of characters, adding to your wider understanding of the world as opposed to certain individuals within it, the game mechanics soon reveal themselves as ideas that lack the sustained interest offered by the best of Hard West’s genre peers.
The problem isn’t that what’s included here is poor as a concept or without value as it’s implemented, it’s just that there’s little to excite you once that initial understanding of your options is attained. It seems that the attempted resolution to this issue is to not explain much of anything to the player, with trial and error your only real way of uncovering the intricacies available to you behind the basics of the tutorial sequence.
It’s satisfying to work out the rules of stealth or a gun’s special ability by yourself - but it’s a poor replacement for genuine depth. Hours of play, often spent repeating a failed stage multiple times, are necessary to fully grasp what’s going on, but player effort doesn’t equate to player satisfaction. The equivalent would be to take part in a math class in which the textbook is locked away from you, the solution to the problems before you only solvable through plugging away until you hit that eureka moment. A certain kind of personality will love that idea, but most won’t.
Hard West is a missed opportunity, a game with some great ideas but one lacking the required polish to do them justice. This is one of those instances in which it’s difficult to recommend the game to most in its current state, whilst simultaneously tempting you to keep your fingers crossed for a future sequel. With a little more time spent delving deeper into what’s depicted here Hard West 2, or whatever, would enjoy the kind of foundation that makes a sequel worth tracking. JOHN ROBERTSON
Full of good ideas, but few of them are fully developed. More time in the oven would have brought out the full flavour.