Most comic strips find that three is enough, and why wouldn’t it be enough?
Setup, development, punchline.
The fourth panel in Peanuts is where things get weird and sad.
A moment after the joke.
A human moment, awkward and brilliant and often deeply memorable.
It’s not really a reduction in complexity, actually, but a clever repositioning of complexity.
It wasn’t how to move and shoot, it was what you might do through moving and shooting.
Lots of games took that and ran with it.
A lot of XCOM-alikes take the two-action-points-per-turn business and transpose it to a new theme.
You get great games like this, of which I believe the original Hard West was one.
XCOM but ghostly cowboys.
But three action points?
This is properly building on the basics of the genre in interesting ways.
Move, then shoot, and then…?
Answering that question is where a lot of the fun of Hard West 2 lies.
What kind of fun?
Fun like synergies between units!
Synergies like, you know, blowing up another of your own units on purpose.
Hard West 2 is another spooky cowboy game.
It’s the old west, but everything’s gothic and frightening.
Get a posse together, tool up, and get after the train.
Taken as an XCOM-alike it’s still an exemplary force for clarity.
And then there are the missions themselves.
Let’s take it one thing at a time.
you could give them stat-boosting trinkets and equipment like band-aids or grenades or tins of beans.
You win them from missions and then use them to make hands.
Here’s the thing, though: five cards.
Not much to play with, is it?
So traits and abilities are this endless choice.
The lord giveth and taketh away, with a flourish.
It hurts to lose out on something, even just for one mission.
And it makes you lust over those cards like they’re made of diamond.
All of this stuff matters because missions require the absolute most of you and your units.
That’s not quite true, because it makes it sound infuriating and binary.
Maps are huge and rangey here - valleys and chasms and dusty main streets that go on for ages.
Plenty of enemies, and different types of enemies.
Those three action points: use them to kill an enemy, and WHAM.
You get them all back again.
So you kill someone, and you get a unit completely refreshed.
Maybe you then kill someone else: WHAM.
Bravado kicks in and you’re good to go once more.
it’s possible for you to chain kills, refreshing yourself with each dead baddy.
So much to talk about here.
Thematic resonance, mates.
It encourages you to take risks - to over-extend yourself because you’re betting big.
Repeat: blowing up your own guys is a synergy strategy here, and far from the only one.
Suffice to say enemy designs only make things more tricksy and compelling.
Grenade guys - I forget the actual names, demolishers?
- are the worst.
So drop everything and get the grenade guys.
Ditto the evil spooky guys who can swap HP with you.
Ditto the guys who can regain HP between turns: meat grinder territory.
Who to kill first.
And who to do it with.
This is finally where the character skills come in.
One guy can barrage everything in a path in front of him.
Every game that has cover should also have ricochet.
It’s a treat.
you might ride horses here!
The next will be great, sure, but I want to experiment with what I just played again.
All of that and ghostly cowboys?
All of that and Bravado?
All of that and that third action point to make sense of?
