Tag: Switch

SteamWorld Heist II on Xbox Series X

A perfect sequel not only retains the strength of its predecessor but builds on its very foundation. In this respect, SteamWorld Heist II is an example of what can be done when the source has such potential.

It’s been nearly ten years since the original SteamWorld Heist was released, and its team has been through a lot. They’ve taken the series into the genres of deck-building, management sim, and Metroidvanias. Image and Form – the original creators of the series – have also since joined forces with neighboring studio Zoink! Games to form Thunderful.

Steam World Heist II’s story is more than the sum of its meticulously polished brass parts. It exists beyond the plot beats, the party characters, and the player’s exploration of the world. Thunderful’s strength has always been – through seven genre-bending titles and counting – their unalienable creative commitment and hawk-eyed attention to detail.

Thunderful’s world-building is second to none. Their latest adventure is not reliant on the series’ previous titles, however avid fans will relish every expanded detail. At the end of SteamWorld Dig 2, gamers saw the Earth explode into a fractured litany of shards. Throughout which, the crew of the first SteamWorld Heist game spend their time plundering and prospecting.

It’s on one of these shards of broken Earth that players control Captain Leeway and his crew, as they sail their submarine on the ‘Great Sea’.

The pollution of the Great Sea’s water is causing deadly ‘rust’ to spread throughout its citizens. As Leeway and his crew learn more of the origins and repercussions of the illness, they set out to find a solution. This synopsis is an excellent excuse to go on a steampunk seafaring adventure. However, it’s not what I found most endearing about SteamWorld Heist II’s narrative.

Interacting with the varied peoples of the Great Sea was always a joy. Firstly due to their Banjo-Kazooie-like garbled speech, but secondly due to the sheer amount of enjoyable dialogue they would blather. These interactions are highlighted by the intricate details of the world to create a definite lived-in experience. Details such as steambot-style ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ accentuate the absurd alternative history of the series. Beyond that, players can embark on missions to gatecrash a high-society dieselbot soiree and steal someone’s postal delivery. All in all, the world of SteamWorld Heist II feels like a genuine community and interlinked world.

Thunderful’s goals with SteamWorld Heist II are nothing if not ambitious, and this ambition is clear throughout the finished title. However, it can be seen at face value through the fact that players have three multi-layered gameplay elements to play with.

Most of the time you will spend with the game will be in the control of Captain Quincy Leeway. This steambot is the skittish skipper of a submarine that acts as your home away from home throughout the adventure. Submarine combat is more akin to The Legend of Zelda: Windwaker than World of Warships, but it’s still enjoyable enough. Fitting your ship with side and front-facing weaponry, you can automatically engage with enemy vessels while you focus on maneuvering. It’s not a massively intricate system, but it’s engaging enough to find some enjoyment with.

However, Leeway’s control doesn’t just extend to his manning of naval craft. He is the conduit through which players explore the waves and islands of the Great Sea. Although, apart from interacting with NPCs and partaking in some extremely light puzzle platforming, there is very little to do when controlling Leeway.

This is no doubt because combat is delegated to your rag-tag assembled crew. In mirroring the role of a captain, you navigate your crew from mission to mission. Gamers who have played the original SteamWorld Heist will find that the core of combat has not changed significantly. As the practical skill ceiling of the original was so fine-tuned, there was very little to be amended.

The 2D XCOM-style turn-based combat ditches the infuriating intricacies of its source inspiration. Gamers have expressed their frustrations about having a 0.5 percent critical hit chance take out a beloved teammate. As such, the combat of the SteamWorld Heist subseries ditches such a system.

“The missions of SteamWorld Heist II are all handmade, but with random enemy spawns and cover locations you’ll need to stay on your toes”

Brandt Andrist – Art Director, SteamWorld Heist II

You move within a set amount of squares per character and aim your weapons. An easy task at first glance, but becoming an almighty task if you don’t have access to a clear line of fire. Some weapons may fire straight, while some may have a velocity and dip that you have to account for. The challenge in SteamWorld Heist II’s combat doesn’t come from RNG but from the skill of the player.

The footsoldiers of the dieselbot dictatorship are the player’s only antagonists in the first throes of the game. However, even just that one faction is varied enough to battle every step of the way. As the plot unfolds, your pool of adversaries expands. This goes so far as to introduce multiple other factions who can fight with one another, and multi-stage boss fights.

Overall, the bosses of SteamWorld Heist II are bulkier than other enemies. However, many are modular and have multiple areas to attack – from massive back-mounted cannons to protective glass cockpits. This culminates in some genuinely engaging encounters. In an almost choreographed rhythm, gamers can circle gargantuan foes to take them down through multiple smaller attacks.

SteamWorld Heist II is a title that is unashamedly focused on creating engaging and intricate characters. From dieselbot infantry units spouting combative one-liners in battle, to the selection of well-rounded party characters and playful NPCs dotted around the world.

Thunderful Gothenburg has managed to capture something that so many games attempt to portray, yet miss time and time again. SteamWorld Heist II makes the antics of Captain Leeway and his crew feel substantial to the world.

NPCs change the way they interact with you depending on your broad strokes progression through the plot. Beyond that, areas of certain watering holes are gatekept until you earn enough reputation. This reputation is required – through completing missions – to become welcomed by the community.

In these dives throughout the Great Sea, Leeway will bump into bots who are happy to join his ragtag group. From a crow-looking gun-for-hire and a Cyclops sniper robot with self-esteem issues, to an explosive weapon specialist heiress named Dame Judy Wrench. Beyond some unique traits, every added member of your team also allows the player to accomplish more every in-game day. As such, players will see immediate benefits with the added manpower before they have to rest up between missions.

For example, you may find that you have to choose between tackling a harder four-man mission, or two two-man missions. However, with added crewmates, you can expand to doing both on the same day. Or, perhaps, even tackling an even more demanding gauntlet.

Through Leeway, the player has complete control over the classes and perks each crewmate should focus on. However, each class – of which there are six – is determined by the weapon in the character’s hands.

As such, if you wanted to utilize the Brawler trait of exploding cover, then you can’t wield a submachine gun. However, SteamWorld Heist II does lend some variety to its class system. Through completing missions you can level up a class, then switch to another and assign ‘cogs’. These cogs are a limited resource per character, yet they can be spent to keep certain traits between classes.

These traits are not the only way combat is shaped by the player. You also have access to a horde of varied items your crew can equip. These can range from a sidearm and added plates of armor, to even a handy grenade. As such, you can equip your crew differently for every style of engagement.

Overall, the original SteamWorld Heist’s combat was so polished that Thunderful simply had to expand it. However, one area the team has largely reimagined is the player’s movement from mission to mission. SteamWorld Heist sees you pilot your submarine in an open-world exploration of your surroundings. This is a massive change from the on-rails Mario World-esque branching paths of the original.

This open world is segmented through some Metroidvania-style natural blockades – such as strong currents pushing you back, or protruding rocks halting progression. This allows for the player to have complete freedom in what missions they wish to tackle, and when. Throughout the title, there were only a few instances of the narrative being funneled through some scripted missions at certain points.

Effectively, SteamWorld Heist II’s open-ended exploration is an extremely potent and refreshing attempt at an open world. That is until it’s not.

The biggest disappointment of SteamWorld Heist II is the game’s disparity between its first and second halves. In the player’s constant pursuit of an end to the clean water shortage plaguing the land, Leeway is constantly exploring perfectly sectioned-off areas of the map. As such, the world naturally unfolds in front of the player at an orchestrated pace.

The player’s submarine upgrades – which act much like Pokemon’s Hidden Machines – create intuitive blockades to your progress. That is until you breach the dieselbots’ sea wall and enter the suffocating expanse of SteamWorld Heist II’s northern half.

Entering the Frozen Fjords, the natural checks and balances to drip-feed the player progression are left behind. As the player can smash through rocks and speed through strong currents, an area of the map almost twice the size of the first half is made instantly available to them.

The game pinpoints certain areas to look at to progress the narrative, but the optional paralysis is undeniable. The Great Sea’s southern hemisphere acts similarly to the Great Plateau in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It readies the player before showcasing the rest of the playable world.

However, Nintendo allowed the player to progress the plot by choosing the order in which they would tackle the four Divine Beasts.

In letting go of the reins too early, the team at Thunderful strips players of all the self-confidence gained through their meticulously crafted first half. As such, players are plopped into this open world and seemingly expected to ignore the tidal wave of possible missions and instead awkwardly shuffle from narrative beat to narrative beat.

The only other option available to players is to either play Russian roulette and choose missions almost at random or to try and push through the expanse and complete some side content. This is a wholly inelegant solution, and in fact, even impacted the way I interacted with some of the final stages of the game.

I was prompted, after multiple hours in the frozen expanse, to embark on a fetch-quest throughout the whole of the oceanic map. Not an entirely original or engaging task, but one I understood. However, the game’s unfiltered overflow of content came to a boiling point when I was then tasked with completing a mission I had already succeeded in. Just so that the game could re-check the box stating that I had accomplished it.

Despite the seemingly scattershot nature in which Thunderful decides the genre of their latest SteamWorld games, there have been some throughlines that connect many of their titles. Of course, there is the world, with its unique blend of a steampunk-western aesthetic. However, not far behind, are the games’ orchestrated scores and recorded soundtracks.

The orchestrated score of SteamWorld Heist II does the lion’s share of the audio legwork. As such, it perfectly accentuates every narrative and gameplay beat of the title. The jaunty trumpets and strings of Douglas Holmquist’s OST chronicle your experience; from seafaring adventures to bombastic combat themes.

However, the musical highlight is certainly the returning talents of Steam Powered Giraffe. The real-life group has previously blended their unique style into the game world in the original SteamWorld Heist. The group is depicted as their ‘singing antique automaton’ personas in-game, with their original music for the game being broadcast to almost every establishment in the Great Sea.

All songs are written from an in-universe perspective, lamenting over sore bolts and creaky hinges. Their talents are even commented on by characters who listen in through their copies of the band’s discography. I will happily admit that I most likely stretched out my play time a significant amount, just so I could finish listening to a song or two.

The core of SteamWorld Heist II is a supremely polished title. As such, I would have absolutely no hesitance in recommending it – even to gamers who are wary of its turn-based combat. That is if the complete SteamWorld Heist II package was as finely tuned as its fundamental systems and world-building.

The combat is demanding yet fair, to a point where the difficulty ranges are varied enough to allow XCOM veterans and genre novices to plunge head-first into its systems. Beyond that, the atmosphere created by Thunderful is a masterstroke of game design and its musical accompaniment is worthy of accolades by the dozen.

Although, while the game’s narrative hums along like a well-oiled machine in the first half, screws begin to come loose. As the narrative expands exponentially in front of the player in the second half, things start to fall apart. While the core of the title is a shoo-in recommendation for any fan of the genre, the collapsing narrative structure is a genuine shame.

However, a selection of the SteamWorld games – unfortunately, apart from the original SteamWorld Heist title – are on Game Pass. As such, it could be a more sensible option to pick up another instance of this beautifully-realized world – just to make sure you’re not going to be treading water.

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