A bigger and better sequel that sometimes runs into choppy waters.
The SteamWorld series has been kicking around the world of Nintendo for more than a decade, but as we near the end of the Switch’s life, it has faded more into the background, far away from the early days of the Switch when SteamWorld Dig 2 was an early indie highlight. Their latest game, however, is easily developer Thunderful’s best effort since Dig 2, as they revisit the turn-based strategy of SteamWorld Heist with the aptly named SteamWorld Heist 2. This is a bigger and more expansive helping of strategy compared to the original, with a lot more customization and variety. Something can be said about the straightforward focus of the original Heist, but even with a few issues, Heist 2 is a welcome addition to the SteamWorld canon, adding in a fuller, more realized world with lots of juicy strategic fun.
While the original took you from level-to-level on a point-to-point space map, Heist 2 throws you into the water. Early on you take control of a boat that allows you to cruise around bodies of water, seeking new missions, enemy boats, and a decent amount of secrets. The missions are of the same style as the original: 2D side-scrolling maps with a lot of verticality and typically procedurally generated enemy placements. You roll into these situations with a team of robots, making use of their different classes to move around the map and shoot down the enemies. Each character has two action points that can be spent on movement or actions. As someone who has played through the original Heist a few times, diving back into these missions was like riding a new souped-up bike. I immediately dove back into the strategy and started getting used to all the new bells and whistles.
The biggest shift is that you can change your character classes by equipping them with different guns and then work on multiclassing the characters in a way where you mix and match abilities and buffs to uniquely spec out your roster. For example, I took a default Sniper class character and switched them over to an Engineer class that had the ability to take two shots. Using the Sniper class abilities I had unlocked, I was able to make it so those two shots were far more accurate. That’s just the tip of the iceberg though as you can fiddle around with the six(?) different classes and make your ideal version for each character. Heist 2 does run into the issue where every character starts to be able to play similarly, as the only major differences are a small number of character-specific accents, like the ability to use a grenade item as a free action instead of a full one.
The bigger your crew gets, the more complicated everything gets. You can’t save loadouts or anything for characters so you will likely spend a lot of time on the menus to rearrange who has what and what class they are right now. The game also relies on a day cycle, so as you explore the overworld, you can only use each character on a mission once. When the team is all spent, you have to return to a base and spend the night to recharge for another day. It’s a nice idea, but it involves a lot of excess travel around the world map. Sometimes it’s not so bad and fits into the story and gameplay, but other times it slows everything down. I’ve had climatic missions that would play better back-to-back that are right next to each other on the map, but that is instead broken up by needing to go across the map to rest up and recharge the team. It’s a pace-killing decision that forces you to play less of the best parts of the game.
When you are in the water-filled world map, you ride around in a boat that slowly gets upgraded throughout the story so you can access more parts of the map. The boat doesn’t really do much, however, as you primarily get into relatively meaningless skirmishes with enemy boats in real time where you auto-fire weapons and move around to avoid fire in a way that reminded me of a sleepy version of Vampire Survivors.
The change of pace isn’t all bad, but it almost artificially lengthens the whole game, which clocks in around 25-30 hours to get to the end (roughly double the length of the first one). When I’m rolling with my team of bots planning my next set of actions to take down enemies efficiently while taking as little damage as possible, I’m having a great time. Even some of the moments where I’m bogged down by changing loadouts or traipsing through the water is enjoyable. But at times the balance feels off, no matter which of the many interchangeable difficulty settings you can choose from. I take solace with the fact that even amidst this, the character and world design is still clever and neat and the soundtrack from SteamWorld staple Steam Powered Giraffe is radical, matching the quasi-Western theme with good tunes sometimes popping with great vocals.
SteamWorld Heist 2 is in a way the game I’ve been wanting Thunderful to make since they released the first game in 2015. I’m so satisfied by all of the customization and options you have across the 10 different characters, even if I have some quibbles with loadouts and managing class changes. The turn-based tactics of it all are still so delightfully crunchy and awesome, featuring new objectives, unique bosses, and oodles of content. However the constant returns to the bar to rest and the strained simplicity of the water travel hold this back from being such a slam-dunk instant classic as its predecessor. This is a sequel that is bigger and better in a lot of respects, but is also weighed down by superfluous additions.
