Hard west switch how to#

(I think Hard West 2 introduces the third action point, but no matter if I'm wrong and it's in the first game - Hard West 2's certainly been the game in which I first started to really think about the whole thing.) What kind of fun? Fun like synergies between units! Synergies like, you know, blowing up another of your own units on purpose. Move, then shoot, and then.? Answering that question is where a lot of the fun of Hard West 2 lies. Yes please.īut three action points? This is properly building on the basics of the genre in interesting ways. You get great games like this, of which I believe the original Hard West was one. A lot of XCOM-alikes take the two-action-points-per-turn business and transpose it to a new theme. It became clear, in fact, that Solomon and his team at Firaxis had basically created a new sub-genre in tactics games: the XCOM-alike. Watch on YouTube A Hard West 2 gameplay trailer.ĭeep breath.

Hard west switch how to#

It wasn't how to move and shoot, it was what you might do through moving and shooting. By making the rules of the game clear and non-fiddly, it allowed players to understand that the really engaging decisions lay out there on the actual battlefield. It's not really a reduction in complexity, actually, but a clever repositioning of complexity. You can move and shoot, or you can move twice, etc etc. Let's take it back to the start: Jake Solomon's XCOM reboot Enemy Unknown hit on something very special when it reduced the complexity of a turn-based tactics game down to a simple idea: each unit can do two things per turn.

Availability: Releases 4th August on PCĪnyway, I thought of this yesterday when pondering why most XCOM-alike tactics games have two action points, while Hard West 2 has three.

A human moment, awkward and brilliant and often deeply memorable. The fourth panel in Peanuts is where things get weird and sad. Most comic strips find that three is enough, and why wouldn't it be enough? Setup, development, punchline.

Someone once wrote - I can't find the piece, of course - that the reason Peanuts is better, and also weirder and sadder, than other gag comic strips is that it has four panels rather than three. Clever tweaks to a brilliant formula make this a tactics game just built for experimentation.