Played and finished Hard West the last few weeks;

it's a relatively short game (15-20 hours or so), an independent, turn-based weird western (for those who haven't played Deadlands: Weird Western is a genre that combines westerns with some supernatural elements. In case of Hard West, curses, magic cards, the Devil, clairvoyants and more). Gameplay is most like the X-com series on battle maps with a worldmap that has some text-adventure type gameplay (you pick places on a map, chose one from several predefined options and occassionally you'll enter a battle map).

There are several scenarios (with some characters returning from other scenarios) and most scenarios have their own gameplay gimmick on the battle map (a scenario with an inventor has a bit of gameplay where you can develop weapons, items and other bonuses by collecting blueprints and building them in your lab, a scenario with an expedition has you manage food and laborers and so on).

I've played mostly on medium (one map I turned to easy, because I was seriously outnumbered and kept losing). You have the option to turn on Wounds (damage may cause a disability in your characters, which have to be healed by a doctor or so on the worldmap.) or Iron Man (if you lose a critical character, you'll have to restart the whole scenario). I played with Wounds, but not Iron Man.

The scenarios are relatively short, 3 or 4 battle maps per scenario, 8 scenarios total. You usually have 3-4 characters, some battle maps can be completed with stealth, but usually you'll have to fight at some point and you can just use the stealth part to make sure you are positioned correctly for the inevitable fight. Occassionally you have some optional objectives that'll get you extra money or weaponry.

Completing a scenario unlocks up to 3 weapons/items per scenario that will be available for sale at the Fate Trader that is on most world maps. You also unlock playing cards. Each card gives a special ability or a bonus and you can assign up to 5 cards to a character. If you make poker hands with those cards, you get extra bonuses (weirdly enough, I don't think the higher hands give better bonuses, just different ones. Can be my style of playing though, where I prefer glass cannons to tanks).

Combat is turned-base, though if you step into an opponents sphere of influence (a small sphere around each character), they can get a free shot at you. Characters get 2 actions each turn (actions are moving, reloading, shooting, using an ability or item). Shooting a gun usually ends the turn for that character, though there are guns that can be shot twice. Each character also has an amount of luck; luck helps to avoid enemy fire. Shots that miss you deplete your luck, shots that hit you give you extra luck. Characters usually have few hitpoints, so make sure you stay in cover, because 1-3 hits are usually enough to take out your character and healing is limited.

You get some moral choices, but I don't think they mattered that much playwise (maybe some bonus/penalty to luck).

Overall a game I quite enjoyed. It's short, a bit rough and quite difficult (to you can manage difficulty a lot with options and once you get the better weapons, the game can become really easy. In the final fight one of the characters had a rifle that was basically a guaranteed one-hit kill). Downsides: not al game mechanics are explained well and characters sphere of influence could be a bit larger (X-Com uses line of sight for the same thing), the sphere of influence would be like 3 feet in all directions, so a quite useful tactic against isolated enemies is to use your first action to run up to them, stay at 4 feet and shoot them point-blank.