The ambition is clearly there, but, I can't help but suspect, the budget was not. Unfortunately the presentation of the game proper can't quite keep up, with the arid lighting, samey art and over-filled text boxes lending it an undeniable air of cheapness. It's playful, in an extremely serious sort of way. Hard West puts the work in to build atmosphere, front-loading its numerous sub-campaigns with apocalyptic morality tales about deals with the devil, survivor's guilt and mysterious strangers, and peppering the mid-mission dialogue with elliptical prophecies from all-knowing hermits and mad soothsayers. So please don't turn up expecting turn-based Red Dead Redemption - though at a pinch, you're getting the Undead Nightmare add-on. The narrative, doomy and dry, offers no shortage of Frontier tropes, though all rapidly tend towards the mystical. It's a testament to the solid, tense combat that Hard West always feels like it's walking its own road even despite this. The meat of the game is really just some men with guns versus some men who sometimes have horns. Its Wild West concept barely has a moment to breathe before it lays the demonic aspect over the top of it, to the point that it might as well have been set in present day Chicago, Belgium's distant future or Dagenham high street on Tuesday, February 10th, 1981. For all the superficial similarities - the percentage chance to hit, the cover system, the permanent fatalities - it's very clearly trying to be its own game. True, we prayed every day for a new X-COM during those wilderness years, but we didn't want the entire genre to be about it. There was a time when 'turn-based strategy' wasn't defined by XCOM, you see. It's a turn-based strategy game with roleplaying elements with cowboys.
Point is, this isn't a game about gradually building up a super-squad and a grandiose base in order to take down an almighty, otherworldly threat, but about a small gang of gun-wielders carving or limping their way through more disassociated skirmishes. Demon cowboys, yes, but really they're just cowboys with horns and a flame effect. Much has been made of how Hard West is XCOM-with-cowboys, but if anything it's more like Jagged Alliance.
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