The SteamWorld franchise has dabbled in a wide variety of genres over its decade long history. Now, the developers are revisiting one of their earliest games eight years later with SteamWorld Heist II. Back at Summer Games Fest, we got to go hands on with the game, and it was a whole lot of fun. It was also interesting to learn from the developers that they returned to Heist after all this time so they could finally revisit and expand on ideas they had way back then.
For those unaware, SteamWorld Heist II is a 2D sidescrolling tactics based shooter. There aren’t many, if any other, developers doing a tactics in 2D, so this game feels different from what you usually expect from a 2D sidescroller. Overall, combat is a lot of fun having to come up with strategies in a 2D environment where you can just move anywhere you want in a 3D space. 2D tactical battles aren’t all there is to the game either as it features ship based combat on the world map. As you move around to different areas, you use your crew’s ship and actively move around the map. However, there are also enemy ships to engage with that will try and take you down. Fighting back is automatically down as your ship will start firing its cannons when an enemy ship is close enough.
In actual battles, you then have a party of characters which will grow to ten playable characters. However, party size won’t grow that big in combat. The game features a job system akin to classic RPGs. Characters will be able to be assigned jobs based on the weapon they are holding, so you’ll be able to switch up which job you want a character to have easily. There will be six different jobs for players to use including Flanker, Reaper, Engineer, Boomer, Brawler, and Sniper. Thus, there will be plenty of combinations for players to work out to take on battles. You will also have cogs that will grant characters different abilities to use.
What really caught my eye is how absolutely stunning the game’s visuals are. I could barely take my eyes off what I was looking at. At one point, I was just mesmerized by how intricately designed and detailed the characters and environments were. Even the when exploring in the ship, the visuals are still extremely charming.
Fans won’t have to wait long as SteamWorld Heist II releases on all platforms on August 8, 2024 with preorders being avialable now! You can check out the new trailer for the game below:
You can see our playthrough of the opening section of the game below: