Hard West 2 Review
Cowboys, outlaws, ghosts, demons, werewolves. These are all good things. Combine them together and you get the Weird Western genre, which must surely be an even better thing, right? Hard West 2 makes a good case for it, standing as a tactical weird western that knows this genre has to look, feel, and sound good first and foremost — even if that means sometimes it doesn't actually play as smoothly as you'd like.
Hard West 2 is more of a thematic sequel to 2015's Hard West as opposed to a literal one. It tells a new, unrelated story across its 20-30 hour campaign, with three difficulties of escalating brutality to choose from, and even completionists shouldn't really worry about playing the original before this one. The world design is really what draws you in beyond the superficial surface. You lead a posse of badass cowboys on the verge of the supernatural in the Hard West. After a bad deal with a bad devil goes badly wrong, you are down a few souls and would very much like them back. In fact, the plan is to get them back at the barrel of a gun. (The devil's name is Mammon, by the way, and he has an extremely cool ghost train with giant metal centipede legs.)
The campaign is split between doing dialogue-driven quests in overworld areas and diving into turn-based combat missions for most of the playtime. The writing both in and out of missions is hit or miss. It has more than a few lines with weird grammar or eye-rolling cliches, but does the job well enough that I wasn't skipping cutscenes or text-only descriptions.
The centerpiece of Hard West 2 are its tactical battles. They're pretty good, but for everything I like about them I dislike something else. The combat is reliable and has minimal frustrating randomization, but
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