Hard West 2

Turn-based tactics has spent a decade in XCOM’s shadow. Fire, miss, swear, reload the save. Ice Code Games — a Polish studio that inherited this series from CreativeForge, who made the 2015 original — looked at that loop and asked a heretical question: what if killing something gave you your turn back?

That’s Bravado, and it is the load-bearing wall of the entire game. Land a kill, get a full refund on movement and actions. Land another, refund again. A well-read map doesn’t become a firefight; it becomes a chain reaction, one gunslinger pinballing across the board leaving five corpses and never once ending their turn. Pair it with bullet ricochet — bank a shot off a hanging lantern, a shovel blade, the revolver in an enemy’s hand — and you have a tactics game that plays less like chess and more like trick-shot billiards with a body count.

Positioning-wise, this is a mid-budget genre entry punching well above its production values. It landed in August 2022 at $29.99 and drew a 77 on Metacritic. That number is instructive. Nobody disputes the combat. The disagreement is about everything surrounding it.

The setting is Weird West — Deadlands territory, demons and cults and the damned — and the framing is pure frontier gothic: Gin Carter loses his soul in a card game with the Devil and assembles a posse of outlaws, including an undead gunslinger and a witch, to hunt down the Ghost Train. Between fights there’s a branching overworld, narrative choices with consequences, posse relationship management, and a card-artifact system that hands out stacking poker-hand bonuses.

It’s a lot of systems. Only some of them are load-bearing.

• Bravado (Turn Refund on Kill): Every kill fully restores the acting character’s turn. The design consequence is enormous — encounters stop being attrition and become setup problems. Find the opening domino and the entire map falls.
• Bullet Ricochet: Shots bank off reflective and metallic objects — lanterns, tools, enemy weapons — enabling angles on targets in hard cover. It converts the battlefield’s clutter from decoration into ammunition.
• The Luck Meter: Incoming fire drains Luck before it touches health, and Luck depletes as characters dodge. It replaces XCOM’s slot-machine cruelty with something closer to a shield with a visible timer — the moment a character starts actually getting hit is visible in advance.
• Playing-Card Artifacts: Equipment is literal poker cards. Assemble hands across your posse for stacking bonuses and unlock character-specific abilities. Elegant thematically, genuinely deep mechanically.
• Branching Overworld & Posse Dynamics: A stylized map layer with narrative events, resource pressure, and relationship state between the five outlaws that carries lasting consequences.

The Gameplay Loop

Here’s what separates Hard West 2 from its peers: it removed randomness as an excuse.

In most squad tactics, a 78% shot that misses is a story told later. Here, the Luck meter makes damage legible. Every shot that “misses” is chewing through a finite buffer, and it drops visibly. That single change reorients the player from gambler to engineer. No praying to the dice. Just solving.

And solving is the operative verb, because Bravado turns combat design inside out. In an XCOM-style game, the question is how does a squad survive the enemy turn? Here, the question is how do you make sure there isn’t one? Every encounter opens as a puzzle with a hidden solution: which enemy is the weakest link, which reposition after the kill opens the next lane, which ricochet cracks the guy behind the wagon so the chain doesn’t break.

When it works, it’s transcendent. A single character crossing an entire map, killing four enemies, and ending on high ground without the opposition ever acting is a rush this genre almost never delivers.

When it doesn’t work, the failure mode is ugly and specific: a reload. If the chain breaks on step two, the result isn’t a bad tactical position — it’s an unrecoverable one, with two characters exposed in the open and a full enemy turn incoming. The game’s greatest strength is also its narrowest tolerance. Hard West 2 doesn’t reward improvisation nearly as much as it rewards foreknowledge, and foreknowledge on a first attempt means save-scumming. Reviewers flagged sharp difficulty spikes, and the spikes aren’t really about numbers. They’re about encounters where the intended solution is singular and the game gives no signal that it’s been missed.

Where the Structure Frays

The tactical layer is a 9. The connective tissue is a 6, and the gap shows.

The overworld is the clearest offender. It’s attractive, it branches, it dispenses events with real stakes — and it never develops the mechanical weight to justify the time spent in it. Traversal costs supplies, events resolve via stat checks and choices, and the whole thing functions as a pleasant intermission rather than a second game worth mastering. Compare it to how Battle Brothers or Darkest Dungeon make their strategic layer actively adversarial, and Hard West 2’s map reads as a menu with scenery.

The story has the opposite problem: it’s swinging. The Weird West premise is terrific, the writing has genuine snarl, and the posse are memorable in a way tactics-game squads rarely are. But the narrative rarely intersects with the combat that fills most of the campaign. A consequential choice, then forty men shot in a canyon, then another choice. The two halves are roommates, not partners.

The Card System Is the Quiet Triumph

Buried under the flashier mechanics, the poker-card artifact system is the best-integrated idea in the game. It’s thematically perfect — a game about a Devil’s card game where the gear is cards — and mechanically it creates a genuine build-crafting layer. Chasing a flush across a posse while balancing who gets which unlocked ability is the kind of optimization loop that keeps a full campaign from calcifying. More games should steal this.

The aesthetic is confident and cheap in the right proportions: muted dust-and-blood palette, heavy comic-panel framing for story beats, and character silhouettes that read instantly on a cluttered board. It isn’t technically impressive. It’s well-directed, which matters more.

The UI is where the polish thins out. Information density is respectable — cover states, hit odds, Luck values are all surfaced — but the camera is the recurring complaint and it’s a fair one. Verticality and cover clutter conspire against the player, and in a game where a misread sightline costs the run, fighting the camera to confirm a ricochet angle is not a small annoyance. The ricochet targeting preview in particular is functional but imprecise; angles that look calculated can mislead.

As a 2D game of this scope, it is light on hardware demands. But the design leans hard on reloading, and the difficulty’s tolerance for improvisation is narrow enough that the save system becomes less a convenience than a crutch the game quietly requires.

Steam, mouse and keyboard, exactly as intended. Ricochet planning demands pixel-accurate cursor work and rapid camera orbiting — this is a design that would suffer badly on a stick. Controller support exists; it is not the way to play a game whose central verb is “aim at a lantern.” Deck players should treat trackpad-plus-touchscreen as a workable compromise rather than a native fit, particularly given the camera friction. Cloud saves and mid-mission saving are present — and given how much reloading the difficulty design encourages, the mid-mission save is doing heavy lifting.

Hard West 2 is a great combat system in a merely adequate game, and that ratio is more honest than a higher, flatter score would be. Ice Code Games took the single most ossified loop in tactics and put a crowbar under it. Bravado deserves to be copied — widely, and by studios with ten times the budget. That it arrives attached to a serviceable overworld and a story that runs parallel to the action instead of through it is a shame, and for most players it is close to a disqualification.

Buy it for the shootouts, and only if the frame around them being thinner than the picture sounds acceptable. The 77 is right. The combat deserves a 9. The game around it doesn’t.