SteamWorld Heist 2 Review

It’s kind of an odd shift for a sequel to go from an outer space setting to a nautical one, but SteamWorld games have never shied away from being kind of odd. In fact, it’s their whole thing. There are direct connections between the silly swashbuckling story of SteamWorld Heist 2 and the original from 2015, but those take a while to show up – instead, much of Heist 2 feels completely separate as it gives you control of a submarine and a crew full of goofy robots in a colorfully cartoony ocean. This adventure takes place on a surprisingly large overworld map that’s packed with so many tough and tactically deep turn-based missions and lighter side activities that burning through them all took me around 40 hours.

The plot that ensues is appropriately light and fun, revolving around our borderline-competent one-armed captain, Quincy Leeway. He’s trying to escape the shadow of his famous mother and gathering a crew to discover the source of a rusty corruption that’s poisoning the water. I wouldn’t call any of the surprises shocking or its characters especially memorable (I suspect they’d be easier to love if their dialogue were fully voiced) but its robotic heart is firmly in the right place.

What is memorable is the music, for which the relentlessly charming band Steam Powered Giraffe returns with 15 delightfully catchy original songs that play when you’re visiting taverns between missions. I often found myself hanging around a little longer than I needed to in order to let them finish a verse about how nice it is to be a robot before heading back to my ship.

SteamWorld Heist 2’s 2D turn-based tactical gameplay is very similar to the original, but the controls are notably smoother (albeit still a little wonky on mouse and keyboard). Moving your team of one to five bots (depending on the mission) around a side-scrolling level to line up shots and snag loot within their two-action turns is a tricky challenge of efficiency, and having to escape an endlessly increasing stream of enemies as you complete a specific objective rather than just trying to clear the map gives a lot of missions a thrilling finale.

The fact that all of the aiming is done manually by raising or lowering the angle of your bots’ gun arms – in the style of the classic Worms games – gives it a little more life than a lot of turn-based games. It’s pretty hilarious to watch the projected path of a shot from a piercing sniper rifle as you slide it around until it passes through several enemies, then let it fly at the right moment of its gently wobbling sway. That said, you’d have to be a geometric savant to predict what multiple bank shots you’ll be able to line up without moving somewhere first and seeing where the guideline ends up pointing, so a lot of those feel like random lucky rewards rather than something earned. I do feel pretty proud of myself when I successfully land a ricochet shot to hit an enemy behind cover using a weapon that doesn’t have the guideline, though.

Each character starts with a native class that you level up, but you’re strongly encouraged to turn them all into hybrid beasts that mix and match abilities from the six different trees. It’s a very smart and flexible system once you get going, though a lot of that unlocking process, which requires a bot to run missions with each class’s signature weapon type, feels obligatory. You’d be foolish, for instance, to not unlock the first-tier powers of the Sniper and the Boomer on just about everybody: the former allows you to use a Perfect Aim ability that puts a prediction line on any weapon and removes sway, and the latter lets you equip a third inventory item. And I must say, an upgrade you can buy relatively early on that unlocks the first two full tiers of a class’s skills after using it for just one mission made me seriously regret how I’d chosen to spread my experience points thin up to that point.

Once things get rolling and you can combine the best skills from each tree with the 10 bots’ unique special abilities, there are a lot of extremely powerful and satisfying tricks you can pull. Moving around the 2D maps is a snap when Beacon can teleport anywhere you’ve seen (with a three-turn cooldown timer), and pairing that with a good brawler’s hammer means there’s no one he can’t smash for high damage. Chimney’s Tit for Tat ability deals damage to anyone who hits her, and that goes very well with the Pain Amulet item that does the same thing because the effects stack. Hightower’s Abs of Steel ability makes him invulnerable and forces every enemy to attack him that turn – which is excellent for, among other things, buying some time for your crew to make a getaway.

Notably, SteamWorld Heist 2 does away with some of the original’s annoyances, such as a tightly limited inventory system and procedurally generated levels that felt samey after a bit. These multi-chambered stages are all hand-built around their objectives, and you can keep as much of your loot on hand as you like (though there’s no way to level up early-game items, so a lot of it becomes obsolete junk you have to sell off). There are a good amount of legendary weapons that come with unique modifiers, like a melee hammer that gives you extra damage to your sidearm pistol or a sniper rifle that inflicts burning damage, and I often found myself changing up my tactics to take advantage of a new one.

Toward the end of the campaign I’d cranked up the difficulty a couple of notches to keep the enemies competitive with my heavy-hitting teams. (Difficulty can be fine-tuned to your liking on the fly with different sliders for the tactical and real-time modes, as well as a few other options.) Of course, each mission is thoughtfully designed with layers to it beyond simply accomplishing the main objective with your last bot limping out the door with a sliver of health, enemies nipping at their heels. Getting the maximum rating means you’ll have to come back for another run and go for getting all your bots out alive, then do that while also grabbing all of the loot bags (including the one bit of epic loot), and then do the bonus objective – which can be things like hitting multiple switches during the same turn, killing three enemies by dropping stuff on them, or taking out turrets it’d be easier to dash past on your way to the door. Boss fights also put clever spins on the mechanics and challenge you to deal with multiple problems at once as you’re disabling defenses and bashing away to inflict as much damage as possible.

Enemy variety is another strong point. The Rattlers are especially neat looking, in that their designs are differentiated from the more typical junkyard androids of the Navy by the fact that they’ve replaced their metal parts with rust-proof ones made of bone (it is unclear where the bones came from). It can be a little tricky to distinguish some of your own bots from the similarly steam-powered Navy enemies until you get to know them better, but with several sets of melee, ranged, and special enemies (like the Rattler who drops totems that can hit your team with elemental damage every turn if you don’t take them out) there are a lot of variables to consider and threats to prioritize on every mission.

If that sounds overwhelming, know that there are zero consequences for failing a mission – you just try again (with no fee to repair your bots like in the first SteamWorld Heist). You can also reload a checkpoint from two turns back, so while you can save-scum your way through a mission it’s not quite as easy as undoing the one bad move you just made. Considering there’s no real way to know and plan for what type of bot will be best suited for a mission before you dive in, it’s for the best that failure is very much an option.

Of course, there’s basically a whole second, totally different game built around that idea, which you play as you travel from mission to mission. Where the first SteamWorld Heist’s overworld map is something akin to Super Mario World’s connected nodes, this one is an open-world game unto itself, if a relatively simple and two-dimensional one. The map itself is surprisingly large, and there are plenty of side challenges to engage in to reach treasure chests in which you have to navigate currents or run gauntlets with guns firing on you from both sides. Puttering around this expansive maze of waterways is a nice, lighter break from the turn-based tactics; tangling with enemy watercraft, running occasional obstacle courses, and unlocking routes and shortcuts with new abilities is quite a bit shallower than the main event, but it definitely has a few tense moments because you can’t replenish your sub’s health without docking and ending your day, and getting sunk means losing all your booty. I especially like occasionally coming across battles between fleets of ships from the two main enemy factions going at it and cleaning up the wreckage after I finish them off – that kind of thing puts a little bit of life and spontaneity into what’s otherwise a pretty static world.

You can only cruise around for so long, though, because each bot is good for one mission per day. In order to maximize your return before coming in to dock for the night you’ll want to look for mission combos that let you use up everybody on your current roster, which might mean replaying a mission or two. That said, there doesn’t seem to be a time limit or anything, so if you wanted to you could simply do one mission every day and just use the same squad for nearly everything. But that’d be boring (and would leave some of your crew underleveled).

Combat with boats and other subs is along the lines of “bullet heaven” games like Vampire Survivors, in that your sub fires automatically (as long as a target is within its weapon arcs) while you focus on steering out of the way of incoming cannonballs and torpedoes. There’s certainly some skill to approaching enemies outside of their gun arcs and spinning to line up all of yours, and it gets a little deeper once you unlock the ability to boost your engines and submerge (see what I did there?). SteamWorld Heist 2 does a reliable job of rolling out upgrades to prevent both combat and the satisfying act of uncovering the map’s fog of war from becoming too one-note over the course of three dozen hours. There aren’t a ton of different enemy types to battle out here, but you’ll see enough destroyers, battleships, skiffs, and subs – and find better guns, engine boosters, armor, and the like to upgrade your sub with – to keep things interesting.