Previews// PAX Round-Up: Guns of Icarus: Alliance and Hard West

Chris O'Regan, host of The Sausage Factory podcast (which takes a deep dive into the development process with games studios, you should listen to it), has travelled to the future to sample the games that will be interfering with your older brain. When we say the future, we mean PAX Prime. When we say 'interfering with your older brain', that is exactly what we mean. Read on for what he found...


Guns of Icarus: Alliance
Developer: Muse Games
Format(s): Windows PC

We at SPOnG have covered Guns of Icarus Online before to the extent that we interviewed Muse Games on The Sausage Factory in Episode 36. So why are we covering it again? Well like any online only game with a vibrant player base, Guns of Icarus Online is evolving into something else in the form of Guns of Icarus: Alliance. This is a departure from the adversarial play that the original game had, as it brings teams of players together to overcome AI controlled enemies that should not be underestimated else the players' ships will come to a grizzly end.

For the uninitiated - Guns of Icarus Online takes place in an alternate universe where the surface of the Earth has been ravaged by war and environmental disasters and the few remaining humans spend their time floating above it in airships. These air ships need to be protected from bandits and opposing factions and the player takes the role of a crew member of a weaponised airship.

Guns of Icarus: Alliance is an expansion to the original game that offers a brand new mode of play. It pits the player against an aggressive AI that adapts to player actions in a similar way to the AI director found in the Left 4 Dead games. Each session has a scenario that has key mission objectives that players must complete in order to succeed. These objectives range from protecting a convoy to taking out key installations of an enemy faction.

From the time I had with it I found Guns of Icarus: Alliance to be a slightly more intense experience when compared to the player vs. player game mode as players are expecting to win. They believe they are superior in intellect and ability to a set of sub-routines and they are right in thinking that, but that doesn't stop these same routines blindsiding the player. It's that aspect of any co-op game that brings it into its own, and Guns of Icarus: Alliance does this with abundance.

Guns of Icarus: Alliance will not be out until early 2016, but Kickstarter backers and pre-order people will be within a closed beta until then to help Muse Games iron out all the wrinkles in it before it's released.

Hard West
Developer: Creative Forge Games
Format(s): Windows PC, Mac & Linux

The Western is been a theme that has been covered in video games in varying degrees of success. Red Dead Redemption is the most celebrated, and deservedly so as it is an exceptional game. But what if we took the same setting (to some degree, at least) and infused it into an XCOM like interface? Oh and let's put in a choose-your-own-adventure overarching aspect into too! What do we get? Hard West is what we get, and it's a game that I played and did reasonably well at while at PAX Prime 2015.

Upon initial inspection Hard West is set in the Wild West of the USA in the 1800s, but scratch the surface and things aren't as straightforward as that at all. For not only are there Mexican bandits and gun slingers, but also demons, monsters and zombies roaming the harsh and windswept landscape of the American West. Hard West is set in an alternate reality where the monsters in the closet are actually there and not a figment of your imagination.

Hard West sports two play areas, one is an over-map that the player traverses and in which they carry out actions based on decisions that are presented to them. These decisions have a direct impact on how the story unfolds and can even alter how the other aspect of Hard West plays out, which is the tactical combat. During the demo I played I was encroaching on an encampment of cannibals. While I could have blundered in with guns blazing, I instead pretended to befriend them before entering the tactical map affording me the chance to scope out the area then carry out my intended mission of rescuing someone from their boiling pot.

The core of Hard West is the tactical engagements, as is the case with XCOM, and there are similarities between the games that are more than coincidental. Units can take cover and also gain advantage when firing from an elevated position. Additionally there is a resource known as 'luck' that decreases as shots whizz by units to the point where once depleted they will likely be hit. This results in players deploying a form of suppressing fire on enemies using rapid fire or pinning actions.

Player characters also have stats that improve as they continue to survive and progress through Hard West. Additional abilities are awarded in the form of playing cards that when combined with similar suits or other poker hands provide extra bonuses that become critical to success in order to complete missions.

From what I played of Hard West I found it to be really well put together and did much to lean on my play experience with XCOM. So much so that I was using a lot of the strategies from XCOM to succeed in Hard West, the key being measuring risk against exposure to your units and you will win the day.

Hard West is out now for Windows PC, Mac and Linux.