60/100
Players10 ratings: 88/100
Critics4 reviews

Where to get it

2022 · Ice Code Games · Role-playing · Strategy

Hard West 2

Hard West 2 is a supernatural journey to the dark heart of the West. With a gun full of lead and a fistful of witchcraft, raise an outlaw posse and chase down the devil to take back what’s yours.

Released: 4 August 2022
Platforms: Xbox Series X/S Windows PlayStation 5
Genres: Role-playing Strategy Tactical Turn-based strategy Turn-based tactics Western
Developers: Ice Code Games
Publishers: Good Shepherd Entertainment Klabater
Modes: Single-player
Perspective: Bird view / Isometric
Themes: Action Horror Historical
Engine: Unity

About

Hard West 2 is a 2022 tactical role-playing game developed by Ice Code Games and published by Good Shepherd Entertainment for Windows. It is the sequel to Hard West.

›Story

Blaze a trail back to the dark heart of the West in Hard West 2.

You are Gin Carter, a notorious outlaw with a reputation as dangerous as the frontier itself.

On the hunt for a big score, you hear talk that the legendary “Ghost Train” is heading your way loaded with federal gold. This is the one.

You swiftly assemble a posse of outlaws, some with guns, others with the kind of supernatural skills that make saloon bars fall silent in a split second.

Night falls and the posse rides out, silhouetted in the spectral light of the moon. Together, you transform the prairie into an ungodly land echoing with gunfire and the screams of the hunted.

But once on board the train, you discover it’s not named the “Ghost Train” for nothing. What follows is the fight of your life through the uncharted badlands of the Hard West, propelled by bullets, witchcraft, and your pursuit of personal salvation at any cost.

Chase down the devil himself and take back what he stole — your soul.

Keywords

western
wild west

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

Players control an outlaw, Gin Carter, in a Weird West setting that includes demons, witches, and zombies. After attempting to rob a train, Carter discovers it is a ghost train owned by the demon Mammon. Mammon steals Carter's soul and dumps him. Carter must find and defeat Mammon to recover his soul.

Players can recruit a posse of gunfighters and melee specialists, each of whom have special abilities. These range from tactical bonuses, such as shooting through cover, to supernatural abilities, such as switching bodies with anyone in line of sight. When completing missions, players are given a poker card. Assigning these cards to characters improves their special ability based on the rank of their poker hand.

Reception

Hard West 2 was released for Windows on August 4, 2022. The game received "generally favorable" reviews from critics, according to the review aggregation website oMetacritic.

Rick Lane of Rock Paper Shotgun said he enjoyed the game and its changes to the standard tactics game formula, though he criticized it for having arbitrary difficulty spikes and occasionally difficult controls. In his review for PC Gamer, Ian Evenden described Hard West 2 as "a superb tactics game" whose fun combat makes its other issues tolerable. IGN's reviewer, Jon Bolding, wrote, "Hard West 2 has plenty of little annoyances, but it's a supernatural western tactics game with a lot of style and the substance to back it." Eurogamer recommended the game.