Cowboys Vs Aliens

A while ago, I mentioned I'd bought XCOM and XCOM 2 for pennies on the dollar in a Steam sale. I was jonesing just a little for a turn-based, tactical game, having recently finished Solasta, as well as Dungeon of Naheulbeuk a while before that. From everything I'd heard, which was a lot, it seemed the X-COM games would sate that craving nicely.

Well, they didn't. Or XCOM didn't, anyway. I can't relaibly comment on XCOM 2 because I haven't played it. After a few hours with the original I didn't feel like wasting any more of my time on the franchise.  

Which is odd, isn't it? XCOM is supposed to be the apogee of the genre. If I like this kind of thing at all, why would I not like what's widely thought of as its finest example?

Because it's a thick-headed, macho, militaristic power fantasy? Because it's eye-strainingly ugly to look at at and ear-jarringly harsh to listen to? Because it's filled with characters that have the personality of cardboard cut-outs? Because the plot reeks of xenophobic paranoia? Because gameplay is slow and ponderous and fundementally dull?

All of those. Granted, the gameplay probably improves when you get out of the tutorial and the game stops telling you exactly what to do and how to do it but I stuck it out for an hour and there was no sign of that happening any time soon so I thought about the sunk cost fallacy and quit.

There's a small chance I might one day give XCOM 2 a go to see if lessons were learned but I suspect that nothing much will have changed except the pictures might look a little prettier. In retrospect, it occurs to me the main reason I was interested in the game in the first place was because a bunch of bloggers wrote it up in a very entertaining fashion. Other than that, I would never even have looked at it.

No-one that I remember reading has ever written up Hard West in any fashion, entertaining or otherwise, so when I decided to buy the game earlier today, I had no-one to blame but myself if it turned out to be a dud as well. Like the XCOM titles, the game was on sale at a massive 90% off as part of Steam's "Turn-Based Carnival". At less than two quid it seemed worth the risk.

At time of writing, I've played Hard West for three-quarters of an hour. It's not long but it's long enough for me to say that I prefer it by several orders of magnitude to XCOM. I know why, too.

For a start, it's a lot less painful to look at. One of the big problems with XCOM is all that 1980s CRT monitor green. Hard West is typical old west sepia and a lot easier on the eyes.

Graphically, it's reasonably attractive, with some nice spot illustrations and interstitials. There's decent scenery in the gameworld itself and the UI is agreeable. It's not going to win any prizes for design or artwork but it's not at all unpleasant to look at. 

Sonically it's a lot better than that with some nice, atmospheric Western-style music and some crisp sound effects. The overall impression is professional without feeling slick and souless, which is how XCOM felt to me.

The forty-five minutes I played included the tutorial, which took up no more than five of those. It's also optional but the game promises that if you take the tutorial, it will be both short and useful. It keeps that promise.

The premise of the game is that, out there in the isolation and loneliness of the vast, unexplored, as-yet unexploited American west, pioneers and settlers, desperate and untethered from society as they are and believing themselves unobserved, will turn towards the darkness that presses in all around and embrace it for their own advantage. 

Or, as the official description rather more pithily puts it : "... a world where Western legends meet demons, arcane rituals and satanic cults and where the dead can walk the Earth again. For a price."

That is a lot further up my alley than military SF, a genre I've never had much time for in any medium. It's still macho men with guns but at least they're rugged individualists facing down threats to their families and homes rather than infinitely replaceable cogs in a vast, faceless military machine, engaged in a barely comprehensible global conflict. 

The difference between the two takes couldn't be more clearly illustrated than by what happens if one of the team dies on a mission. In XCOM the rest keep going and if they win, their dead colleague is replaced by a new recruit. In Hard West, if one of your team dies, it's game over. 

Or at least you have to start the mission again from scratch, which I'm sure is going to become equally annoying after a while, even if it does serve to emphasize the importance of the individual over the team. Still, I prefer it.

Well, I say I do now, when I've only done two missions and only failed one of them, once. Ask me again when I get stuck on one and can't get past it because some idiot on my team keeps getting himself killed. That's probably when I'll cave and accept one of the well-dressed, well-spoken stranger's repeated offers of assistance. I mean, I haven't been playing an hour and he's already tried it on with me twice. I get the feeling he isn't going to give up easily.

I did read some of the reviews on Steam, which are mixed, so I'm aware it's not a game where you can keep playing the good guy. Eventually you'll have to make some hard choices and take the consequences. For now, though, I'll just stick to straight-shooting and see how far that gets me.

However far it might be, I'm pretty sure it'll be a lot further than I was ever going to get with XCOM.