It’s easier for us to do this than work on a brand new genre.” “Thankfully, we’ve also worked on quite a few strategy games at this point. Lessons came mostly from the player base, like what worked and what didn’t work, and then we spent more time designing how we wanted to address that,” Vrolijk tells us.
“We spent a lot of time just listening to what players have to say. Of course, the most valuable place to glean insight when making a sequel is the feedback to the first game. In a desperate attempt to save yourself, you suggest playing a gamer of Poker with the devil, and lose, of course.” “You do the foolish thing, you fight them, and you lose. Suddenly we have magic and witchcraft, and we meet the baddie of the game, who may or may not be the devil himself.” Vrolijk explains. Near the end of the mission demons show up. “You actually get to play the whole train heist while moving. It’s turn-based, but that hasn’t stopped the team from creating a sense of motion and urgency. Cowboys shoot at one another from behind cover and between train cars, while more on horses ride alongside the train to assist.
Should enemies rock up outside the tavern you’re in, you’ll be taking cover next to windows and shooting outside at enemies hiding behind barrels.īut not all stages are static, as the first stage from the demo we played has you fighting with your gang aboard a moving train. You can likely already visualize a lot of shootouts – think Red Dead Redemption 2 if it was a strategy game. Yes, it has a lot of similarities to XCOM in that sense, but the way things play out is far more interesting. Hard West 2 is a turn-based strategy that features cowboys shooting guns at one another. “So some of it is based in history, but we add a lot of fantasy elements on top of it to give our own feel to the world.” Some of it is based on Christian beliefs, like the devil, demons, but some of it is folklore, enemies that come more from the tall tales of mystical creatures,” Good Shepherd’s senior marketing manager Vernon Vrolijk tells GLHF. “So we take an actual timespan, and we take a lot from folklore of the time for supernatural elements. Hard West 2 isn’t a historical timepiece, by any means.