YMMV / Hard West

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: A good portion of the absurd gun designs in the game are based on real (but no less weird) guns.
• Angst? What Angst?: Since the only person outside the "Scars of Freedom" DLC scenario to have any spoken dialogue is the narrator, Death, one never really gets a greater introspective into what the other characters are thinking as scenarios and missions unfold. One big example would be how Warren and his father, aka The Undertaker, would feel about fighting each other to the death in the final mission.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Any hit-chance calculation above 80% is rounded up to 100%, while anything below 20% is rounded down to 0%. The former removes any ambiguity in taking any high-odds shots (i.e. the 1-in-50 possibility of missing a 98% shot). The latter avoids any situation where you might die from a very low-odds shot landing from the opposing side, as well as making tedious long-range shot-spam tactics unviable.
• Awesome Music: One of the best parts of the game is the atmospheric music done by Marcin Przybylowicz, who also worked on the soundtrack of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
• Broken Base: Some features have been quite divisive among the fanbase.
  • Lack of manual save. There's an autosave feature in a single save slot, but only on the worldmap. Supporters view it as a way to force players to ponder each decision (while preventing Save Scumming), while detractors consider that the absence of any save during a tactical encounter is just Fake Difficulty.
  • Only enemies can use overwatch, which is either seen as forcing you to play with a tactical mind, or an unfair advantage to the AI.
• Complete Monster: Satan himself is the mastermind behind all the ills in the game. Having a benevolent society seeking to cure violent dementia wiped out by a corrupted inquisitor, allowing the illness to flourish, Satan orchestrated a series of deaths to eventually corrupt the gunslinger Warren, having Warren and his pure-hearted lover Florence killed. Once this is done, Satan revives Warren to send him on a killing spree, intending on having him destroy purgatory so the mad souls cause humanity's extinction and leave an undead Warren to rot in an empty world forevermore.
• Disappointing Last Level: Purgatory, the finale of the On Earth, as it is in Hell scenario and Warren's storyline. The entire scenario up to this point is spent putting together a party capable of breaking into it. However, the final combat is only against 4 other enemies, and your party is likely loaded with endgame equipment at this point, making it fairly trivial to win. However, doing so earns the bad ending; to get the good ending, you either have to play as the opposing party — meaning you have to fight that dream team you've spent the past few hours building and arming with quality gear — or choose to commit suicide after you win.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Judge. A single shot rifle that can be unlocked during the On Earth, as it is in Hell scenario. It is capable of killing every enemy in one shot and dealing significant damage to those in cover. It also gives aiming bonuses to the character using it. What pushes the gun into this is that it can be bought from the Fate Trader in every scenario after it is unlocked.
  • The Golden Bullet ability allows a character to hit anyone with 100% accuracy at any distance, ignoring cover and bullet drop, so long as that character is within line of sight of the party, not just the character taking the shot. Combine that with The Judge and you have a guaranteed one hit kill on almost anything.
  • Jinx is a passive ability that drains nearby enemies' Luck at the end of your turn. During the setup stage, you can just spend turns hanging around idle enemies until their Luck is completely depleted, then proceed to slaughter everyone once the Combat stage commences.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Game mods cannot be used in Scars of Freedom, so those used to using things such as disabling enemy overwatch and hastening the process in which serious injuries become scars are in for a rude awakening.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: The game only offers 8 story-driven scenarios, none of which last particularly long. Unlike similar games such as XCOM: Enemy Unknown, There's no multiplayer or sandbox element.
• That One Level: The start of the On Earth, as it is in Hell scenario immediately throws you into combat alone against a good amount of cultists and a demon who will constantly respawn until you destroy its blood vials and kill it a final time. Smart usage of the items and abilities the game starts you with is critical to survive.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: In a lot of scenarios you're playing as someone doing despicable deeds, or someone in your posse will betray you one way or another. Combine this with Warren being billed as the central protagonist with the narrator character even referring to him in second-person throughout the game, only for Warren to become so far deep that there's no way to redeem him at the end, and you've got a story that pulls a few too many a Player Punch than necessary.

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