Three of the newer (better) additions to the formula are each character's Luck stat, the Cards of Destiny, and the wounding/scarring system.

Maybe you don't play these kinds of games for the characters or the DEEPEST LORE. And of course it's always fun to see a supporting character from one scenario reappear in another, either acting as an origin story or just fleshing out the world a bit.īut maybe you don't care. At first glance, these stories have nothing in common, but one of Hard West's great treats is watching these seemingly unrelated plot threads come together for a final, climactic gunfight.

Other scenarios follow a Thomas Edison sort who comes to the frontier to investigate a curiously contagious kind of insanity that spreads like a virus, a corrupt man of the church who passes himself off as a man of God while secretly doing the Devil's work, an adventurous young gunslinger who sets to find an ancient city of gold in the vein of El Dorado, and so on. Enough gold, perhaps, to escape their dead end lives and the bloodthirsty gang of bandits returning to the region after years of peace when word gets out that there's gold in the hills. The game is split into eight scenarios (nine if you buy the extra DLC campaign or get the complete console edition, like I did), starting with the story of a father-son duo eking out a meager existence on a struggling farm before they find gold in the region. Hard West trades in the world-defending, sci-fi aesthetic of XCOM for smaller, more intimate stories about the outlaws and do-gooders on the rugged frontier of the Wild West before something supernatural stumbles into their lives. Oh, sure, it's another grid-based, bullet-flinging strategy game. You already have a pretty good idea of what's going on here, but I think I may have played the XCOM card a little too early.

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