Hard West

Hard West is a 2015 turn-based tactics game from the Polish studio CreativeForge Games, set in a Wild West where the supernatural is real. Its campaign is a set of linked scenarios, each with its own story and its own map of events and choices between battles.

Battles use cover and action points in the XCOM style, with additions. Luck is a resource: it makes enemy shots miss, and it is spent on special abilities, so a character who has been lucky for a while is about to stop being lucky. Shots can ricochet off metal, and shadows can give away a hidden enemy.

The luck system is a good idea that makes misses feel fair. The setting is unusual and dark, and the scenarios each tell a self-contained story with real choices.

Its campaign is short and its strategic layer is a series of text events rather than a living map. Some scenarios are much better than others.

Hard West is in this family for its campaign of small decisions between fights and its gallery of characters, which recall Jagged Alliance 2's sense of a world around the battles. Its combat is closer to the XCOM reboot. A sequel, Hard West 2, followed in 2022.