

It’s important to note, however, that Hard West II isn’t a turn-based strategy RPG. There’s a great number of fun combinations you can do in Hard West II, and experimenting with the abilities you have while prioritizing who works best for the task at hand is critical. This effectively heals one of your units and then cripples a target, simultaneously healing Lazarus back up to begin the cycle anew. The playing cards you collect will allow you to unlock more of the latent abilities of your units by making poker hands with them, with better hands unlocking more of their skills.Įventually you’ll be able to do fun combinations with your character’s skills, such as having Lazarus swap HP with one your injured characters, and with a poker hand ranking of a straight hand or better, he can then swap HP with an enemy too. Some skills are area damage, some let you fire through walls, but others offer incredible utility like straight up swapping positions with an enemy, letting your other units easily dispatch that target. Setting up a variety of situations where you can knock multiple enemies at once in a single turn can oftentimes change the flow of a losing battle, and don’t forget that you can ricochet bullets to strike enemies in their flanks or around cover, too.Įach character has a variety of skills they can use to their advantage, as well, and many of them have cooldowns short enough that it’s valuable to use them at a constant rate. Bravado rewards the player who presses onward and downs as many enemies as they can. Taking down a target will trigger Bravado and refill your action points for the turn, allowing you to continue taking actions until you run out of enemies to kill. Hard West II rewards aggressive play with Bravado, so rather than playing defensively, as you would default to in many other turn-based strategy games, in Hard West II you’ll want to constantly be moving your units and attack from reasonably fortified positions to down an enemy.

Cover and positioning are important, and denying enemies from using cover is sometimes even more important for chaining turns together with the phenomenal Bravado mechanic. You’ll have access to a variety of different weapons, even explosives, and will need to use terrain to your advantage in order to clear out multitudes of enemies. For the uninitiated, combat in this game involves your group of characters against a number of enemies, with each of you taking turns moving around the environment. Those familiar with games like XCOM will be immediately at home with the gameplay of Hard West II. Hard West II’s main attraction would be its turn-based strategy combat system. There are lots of choices to make at various parts of Hard West II, as well, and many of them will influence greater loyalty with your party members as you progress. Most side quests follow a pretty simple formula of requiring you get an item, or clear an optional battle, but these quests do make entertaining diversions as you venture across the landscapes. While going from place to place, you can stumble across shops, characters, and even side quests that you can complete. In the overworld of Hard West II, you travel on horseback going from town to town, a contrast to jumping from battle to battle using nothing but a menu in most strategy games. Much of the dialogue isn’t voiced, especially little interactions between your characters or for a side quest you may have, but big moments in the story will have the occasional voice acting that helps to set the scenes. What comes next is a supernatural adventure in a horror-western, where Carter and his group fight outlaws, demons, and absolutely everything in between. Quickly assembling a posse, Carter finds that not everything is as it seems when the devil himself comes and steals his soul. In Hard West II, you take control of Gin Carter, a rather notorious outlaw on the hunt for a Ghost Train that’s supposedly filled with treasures. So is Hard West II softer than its predecessor, or is it a firm addition to your Steam library? Let’s find out.

Commanding a group of four gunslingers against overwhelming odds, you can fight off everything from bandits to the undead in a horror version of the American old west. Hard West II is a spiritual successor to the first game, in a way, as it’s developed by a completely new studio, but it supersedes the original and improves upon it in a lot of smart ways. The original Hard West game was a reasonably solid turn-based strategy game that required players to utilize cover mechanics to outgun swaths of foes.
