![]() ![]() There's even a bit of historical inspiration, with one native antagonist group being a mustache-twirling, evil twin mirror version of the real-life Ghost Dance Movement. The enemies you fight are weird and cool, ranging from run-of-the-mill bandits and lawmen to demonic cultist covens, wendigos, and mindless revenant gunmen. ![]() It's not just the atmosphere that's got a lot going on, either. There's also a great soundtrack, courtesy of Dead Space and Tomb Raider composer Jason Graves. The objects and visuals in missions are real pretty, even disproportionately so compared to the design and writing, and the sound design and voice acting have very few flaws. Rickety wooden frontier streets packed with hanging signs and big marble banks at the end, ramshackle homesteads cluttered with disused farm equipment, sprawling occult-plus-steampunk mining operations - I think you get it. The Wild BunchĮvery mission is packed with weird western clutter and character that not only looks good but serves as cover for you to interact with and play around. That said, the good qualities of those combat systems outweigh the frustrations, and a mix of interesting enemies and varied missions do keep it fresh throughout. That, and those area of effect attacks are two dimensional, which leads to odd situations like not being able to shoot someone with your shotgun because they're on a balcony below you. You do that arithmetic every turn, constantly, for more and more kills, and the higher difficulties demand you balance optimal kill counts against defensive movement to succeed.īut beyond that standout mechanic, the combat doesn't do much that's new or exceptional, and even lacks a few things I'd expect - you can't vault most small objects, for example, and a lot of cover is indestructible even to dynamite. It's also a tension on that puzzle-like difficulty: There's always the feeling that you could better optimize the fixed damage numbers of your weapons against the enemy's health. They can do that as many times per turn as you can get kills, and setting up someone to get four, five, or six kills in one turn is the best part of Hard West 2. When your characters get a kill they immediately refill all their action points. The fourth tool is Bravado, the key system that lets you overcome enemy advantage. ![]() The third are your character abilities, unique powers everyone has: Like Old Man Bill, who's full of bullets and likes to send them back at the enemy in an explosive burst, or Flynn, who can magically swap places with anyone she can see, ally or enemy, at the cost of a little health. The second is luck, meaning that missed shots (among other things) fill a pool to spend on bonuses to attacks in later turns. The first is trick shooting, which lets certain weapons bounce bullets off of metal objects to circumvent enemy cover. Luckily, you have four tools to play with. Combined with that defensive focus you have a real problem to overcome when closing in on new groups of enemies: They'll probably get effective shots at you before you get some at them. Your attacks do fixed damage based on the weapon used, and all that changes is the chance to hit based on range, elevation, and the enemy's cover. You get three actions per turn, with shooting usually taking two or three of those, meaning that the rules overall favor defensive fighting. Combined, they form a range of powers that synergize with well-designed environments to enable tricks, combos, and chained kills. That's balanced against the flexible character abilities and neat weapons available. That distinction matters too: On the middle-of-the-road Hard difficulty I had to restart multiple missions, some as many as five times, to figure out the solution to that puzzle and get a win. The combat is reliable and has minimal frustrating randomization, but on the harder missions that makes it feel more like a puzzle than tactical exercise. They're pretty good, but for everything I like about them I dislike something else. The centerpiece of Hard West 2 are its tactical battles. 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 writing both in and out of missions is hit or miss. ![]() The campaign is split between doing dialogue-driven quests in overworld areas and diving into turn-based combat missions for most of the playtime. ![]()
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