You get three actions per turn, with shooting usually taking two or three of those, meaning that the rules overall favor defensive fighting. Combined, they form a range of powers that synergize with well-designed environments to enable tricks, combos, and chained kills. That's balanced against the flexible character abilities and neat weapons available. That distinction matters too: On the middle-of-the-road Hard difficulty I had to restart multiple missions, some as many as five times, to figure out the solution to that puzzle and get a win.

The combat is reliable and has minimal frustrating randomization, but on the harder missions that makes it feel more like a puzzle than tactical exercise. They're pretty good, but for everything I like about them I dislike something else. The centerpiece of Hard West 2 are its tactical battles. It has more than a few lines with weird grammar or eye-rolling cliches, but does the job well enough that I wasn't skipping cutscenes or text-only descriptions. The writing both in and out of missions is hit or miss.

The campaign is split between doing dialogue-driven quests in overworld areas and diving into turn-based combat missions for most of the playtime.

Ign capitalism ii