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Preparation

Cover is Everything

Companions

Upgrades and Collectible Cards

The Overworld

Injuries

Hard West Is Tough as Nails

This is why Hard West is smart, deep, rewarding, tough as nails, and absolutely worth paying attention to.As you begin each stage, Hard West doesn’t immediately enter a combat phase. XCOM doesn’t either, really — you’re allowed to set up and position yourself to initiate — but most of the time you’re on alert immediately or preparing to unleash hell. In Hard West, yes, you have time to scout out enemies, prepare your kill order, and get into cover, but the preparation phase is so much more than this. Levels have secrets to discover, alternate objectives, some of which have a sense of urgency that leads to careful, thoughtful exploration toward a given place. Violence is inevitable and explosive, but the lead-in to drawing your weapon has meaning, whether it has to do with the dark story or the deep gameplay systems.Exposure is dangerous in any tactics game. Protecting yourself is crucial in XCOM, Fire Emblem, Shadowrun, and more. In Hard West, tucking into cover is essential to survival. You’re a frail human in a tattered shirt, not an armored, amazing warrior. Bullets hit hard, draw blood, and ruin you. I made sure each of my turns ended with my characters in cover, even if it meant sacrificing efficiency — because risking vulnerability for the sake of covering more ground is rarely worth it. Enemies operate similarly. I never saw an opponent standing in the open waiting to die. They know how scary bullets are, and the player needs to respect that, too.Your main character can only do so much on his own. He’s alive because he made a deal with the Devil, but he still needs help to keep himself covered, to take down different enemy types, and cover ground. In my first mission, set on a grisly Cannibal farm, I rescued a tortured ally from a box he’d been kept in. He was in rough shape, barely useful, but alive — and if he lives, he’s destined to be a resilient tough-guy that’ll last the entirety of Hard West.But if he dies, he’s dead.Your team is valuable, and their positioning and roles are important because they’re gone forever if the eat a bullet. You need these folks to protect each other, take down enemies, and gain better stuff throughout the campaign.Before you and your hired guns enter a battlefield, you’re able to prepare exactly how you want to tackle the situation. Guns, and gun upgrades, let you manage range and damage. Hard West is also silly as all get out — I walked into a Cannibal Farm mission with an absurd quad-barrel shotgun. Cannibals are spooky enough to justify that many barrels. More importantly, though, is the collectible card element of Hard West. Progress, purchases, and exploration lets you draw cards that imbue characters with new abilities when equipped. Lifesteal, accuracy improvements, and other effects make life easier, but it’s the more active skills I enjoyed most.Fanning your pistol compromises accuracy, but allows a gunman to deal more damage faster. The ricochet is by far my favorite, though. Pinging a bullet off a nearby bucket to take down an enemy hidden around the corner feels fantastic. Launching it off a bucket, into an anvil, off a water pump, and into the face of a sniper on the second level of a barn? Next level.Equipping guns/cards and upgrading your weapons takes place in a non-combat, story-heavy, choice-driven overworld. It’s a separate sort of game, where your dialogue and decisions opens or closes opportunities. In the specific example shown during my demo, poison I purchased in town could be used to poison the water well on the way to my mission area, reducing the base health of enemies at the start. Of course, I could hang onto this for later, use it for something else, and walk into the objective area to take everyone on at full HP.That tortured friend I mentioned? Hard West is even tougher because of him. He’s a victim of Injuries, a Hard West system that makes the game even harder. A mangled face, for instance, means that character is less lucky — and Luck is an important currency. Characters spend Luck when shots miss, decreasing the likelihood they’ll dodge bullets next time. You’ll also find your mobility hampered if your hurt badly enough. Think of injuries like RPG status effects, but instead of someone casting a silence on your party, they spent the better part of the evening in a cannibal torture pit.All of this plays into the main theme of Hard West: This is a very challenging strategy game. Bullets hurt, enemies are smart, and their positioning is, before you even arrive in a level, engineered to make your life miserable.Hard West has a lot of ways to make things even harder on yourself as well. I’m a huge fan of Equalization — a once-per-mission desperation measure that brings everyone down to 1HP. Careful preparation lets you eat roots or other restorative items to regain health, but there’s a special sort of stress tied to taking on folks with extreme lethality. Every missed shot made my heart sink. It’s a huge risk/reward system, one that could be helpful in certain scenarios or a fun challenge for those who want to hurt their own heart.In a brutal time period where everyone is out to kill you, why would you willingly call in enemy reinforcements? Why put yourself in a position where you’re weak? This is a satisfying strategy game. Overcoming its stacked odds in one mission made me want to see what else I could accomplish, and what other devious scenarios Hard West could throw me into.For more on PAX, check out IGN's PAX Hub

Mitch Dyer is an Editor at IGN. Talk to him about Dota 2, movies, books, and other stuff on Twitter at @MitchyD and subscribe to MitchyD on Twitch