SteamWorld Heist

SteamWorld Heist(SWH) is a side view turn-based strategy RPG. The core gameplay mechanics are about shooting, ricocheting and using obstacles. Plan your strategy by taking cover behind obstacles and lure enemies near explosive barrels. The ricochet gameplay is really fun and feels like pool when you hit that crackshot. Headshots may give you criticals. Go on missions to loot different guns, armor, items and water(money). You can redo levels in order to pick up rare guns, items and more water. Losing will cost you half of your water which is needed to buy guns/items/equipment or crew members. Winning will increase your reputation, so you can advance, buy items at the store and recruit bots. The best thing about the SWH are the smooth controls. It's very easy to aim, move your character and select things. Navigating around the map/area is also easy. The graphics and music are great. Clean looking graphics with a distinctive color palette. The music by Steam Powered Giraffe is catchy and fits into the game. The BGM for the game is also catchy. The story is interesting, but not the greatest. I only had a few complaints; there was no panning out on the levels and some cheap difficulty. If you have a gun with no scope, you'll have to judge with your eye. This is difficult when you're trying to shoot something on a large level across the screen and can't see either yourself or the enemy. Panning out the camera view would have helped. Sometimes I thought the reappearing enemies was a bit cheap. On some boards, enemies will continue to come at you non-stop. You'll be able to get through it in about 20 hours. But, I took my time to level up my characters to unlock abilities and loot levels for rare guns. Also you can hunt and collect hats if you want. Doing this will probably make you accumulate about 40 hours like I did. Overall, it was a near perfect game for me and really entertaining. Try New Game+ to go through the game with all of your crew members from the start.

To sum up SteamWorld Heist is not hard; worms style 2D turn based combat with a little bit of X-Com flair when moving. While at the same time staying its own game and taking only the steam punk esthetic from its predecessor, SteamWorld Dig. So the game plays as follows: fly your ship between checkpoints in space - a map or hub area if you will. These may be space station bars where you get your drink on (what do robots drink anyway?), buy weapons and other equipment or hire other scrappy robots which can be used as units in battle. Other areas, enemy ships, is where you will be spending most of your time, battling it out and collecting loot to use or money to spend. Sometimes you may come across a lonesome space station selling hats at outrageously high prices... So the bulk of the game is spent in battles and the combat system is well polished to make that time fly by. You enter a semi randomly generated map (station) with usually two or three teammates equipped with weapons and accessories of your choosing. Each round gives you a movement and attack phase in which you can either hide for cover or attack (sometimes both). Since step count is limited, it is important to find a location in which you will be hard to hit yet still easy to hit your enemy from. It is a simple design that may lack some depth. I would love to have the ability to have one of my teammates just defend a position and shoot whomever wanders into its line of sight but right now all a defending teammate does is cower behind a barrel and get hit if an enemy chooses show who has the biggest metal sack. Attacking is more engaging and rightfully more fun. An assortment of weapons is available all wealdable by its specific class of character. Your everyday pistols, scoped weapons offer bouncing bullets, high spread shotguns, high rate-of-fire multiple shot rifles, AOE line of sight RPG explosions, arching grenade launcher AOE explosion and metal to brass fists all offer different playstiles and entry points to each situation one may find oneself in. I particularly enjoyed scoped weapons which offere laser sights for their easy of use in bouncing bullets off walls to hit harder to hit enemies. Since headshots provide a higher damage output, these were particularly useful. A good combination of different characters with different weapon sets does the job fine while mixing it up just a little bit as to not get too monotonous while shooting only one tipe of weapon (as if it ever could). The reward for clearing out these outposts is usually more gear to use for the next mission or money to buy yet more gear OR a fancy hat or two. Hats are the money sink that makes the economy work as you will soon have enough money to have all equipment you need. It's an alright system that seems to work fine with most virtual macro economies, here being no different. Each map sector ends with a boss fight in which all your skills will be tested against a fairly stronger enemy. The difficulty of these are nicely tuned and provide ample release of dopamine. Esthetically SteamWorld Heist reminds me of Firefly (Tv Series, 2002) albeit with a cartoony overlay. Space ships looking like the scifi future movies promise swapped for coal powered furnaces and steam turbines. Ships held together by sheet metal and rivets. A world populated by robots wielding guns, wearing fancy hats and everything generally feeling like the wild west in space. The music consolidates this idea of steam punk wild west robots in space. Guitar, banjo, bass, fiddle and a strong vocal presence that tells stories of robots are exactly what one would expect from a world such as this. The Band Steam Powered Giraffe[steampoweredgiraffe.bandcamp.com] are personified as robots and can be found in any bar in the game playing their music. I sometimes visited just for the music. SteamWorld Heist is a great game to relax with and not stress over too much. Core gameplay containing simple tactical turn based gameplay. It clearly defines goals and provides extra rewards for extra work / exploration. A pleasant to look at esthetic and guitar heavy soundtrack with some rather fine folksy vocals. It took me 17 hours to beat the game and I enjoyed every minute of it.

Part RPG, part turned-based shooter, SteamWorld Heist is one of those games that you can play on easier modes just to have a good time, or harder modes for a real challenge. As advertised, luck plays only a slight element in making your moves (critical shots, for example). The rest is strategy and skill: picking the right bots and aiming your gun true. If I had to fault this game, it’s far too short. Even with New Game+, it’s nothing special: you keep all your hats and characters, but lose all your weapons and levels. If there’s one more thing I had to give it props for, it’s my ability to play with my son. We take turns with the characters and try to outdo each other in getting the best shot.

I am an old fan of the game Worms; for me, this is like a breath of fresh air. There aren't many good games in that particular genre, 2d plane tactical turned based. The closest that comes to mind is perhaps Angry Birds. At first, I wasn't a fan of the graphics; they are very mobile gameish, in my opinion, but with time they grew on me. The combat is similar to Worms; you pick a weapon, and you aim up and down, but during the mission, you can't change your loadout. It must be done prior, nor do you receive any weapons or items drops. Instead, you get new weapons and items after finishing your mission; in addition to that, there are plenty of hats to be found for you to stylize your characters with and level them up with new abilities. There are bars where you can also find more hats, weapons, abilities, and storage for your inventory, the main currency being, interestingly, water which, again, you receive at the end of each mission. I found this game to be a tad more tactical than Worms; your bullets do bounce around, so you can come up with fun trick shots; there are plenty of classes to choose from, each with its unique abilities and weapon preferences which you can experiment with. The maps are procedural most of them, I believe, so that adds a little variety, especially when replaying a mission. It makes things all the more interesting; there is stuff that can be blown up, for example, fuel barrels, and there are some things that can be useful for cover and certain platforms you can shoot through, etc. Although this is not related to the review, one more thing I like about this game is how lightweight it is for laptops. I mean, this is one of those games you can play for hours on battery power, depending on how long your laptop lasts on a single charge, of course.

Steamworld Heist is a turn-based tactical 2D shooter set in the Steamworld universe. While the Dig series focus on Gold Rush exploration, Heist is about space pirates fighting in a westernized outer space after the Earth asploded. You begin with your Cap'n and her vanguard, rescue both him and your navigator from jail and set back into saving your "skin" and recruit new members to fight against both outlaws and the space empire. Each character (out of 9 in the base game) is a specific class (Assault, Sharpshooter and so on) with specific skills and their own XP progression. Your heavy gunner can turn into a living cover for a turn, your Cap'n can buff and heal crews standing next to her. Most mission are procedurally generated, meaning that even if you grind, the map layout will stay fresh. Difficulty can be adjusted before each mission, allowing you to breeze through to advance, then challenge yourself to grind more XP. You'll get a ton of loot, ranging from accessories (sidearms, grenades, armor) to weapons to currency, which allows you to outfit your crew for optimal results. You can also get hats for fun, by shooting them off your opponents' heads. You'll take advantage of ricochets, perks, explosives and various tools to complete your missions, some straightforward, others adding extras inbetween (like an alarm sending reinforcements nonstop). Dialogues are well written and animation is pleasant. The music sets the mood in a pleasant way, although it may sound repetitive. Leveling up your characters might take a long time, given how XP works: at the end of a mission it's divided between all crew still alive after completion. This is an incentive to increase difficulty (the higher the more XP), but it might be safer to level up first, though even the grind stays fun because it allows you to refine your tactics and toy with gear. "Experienced" difficulty is quite fair, at least early on. For price it's quite a respectable buy, and a lot of fun time.