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. 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.
Hard West 2 reviewDeveloper: Ice Code GamesPublisher: Good Shepherd EntertainmentPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Releases 4th August on PC
Anyway, I thought of this yesterday when pondering why most XCOM-alike tactics games have two action points, while Hard West 2 has three.
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. You can move and shoot, or you can move twice, etc etc. It’s not really a reduction in complexity, actually, but a clever repositioning of complexity. 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 wasn’t how to move and shoot, it was what you might do through moving and shooting.
Deep breath. Lots of games took that and ran with it. 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. 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. Yes please.