In line with my plan to have no plan for this blog thing, I decided I’d ramble about a game I just finished, and how fun it was. The game in question is Steamworld Heist 2.
A friend showed me the first one, and I loved it. It’s a game idea that… we’ve had the ability to make for a really long time, and yet… I can’t think of a game that does ricochet and RPG elements in this way. Worms is the nearest touchpoint I have; that doesn’t do it justice, as there’s a real strategy to planning every bit of a round. I feel bad for not knowing there was a sequel until now, as I honestly adored the first game.
It’s definitely occurred to me that this game ticks so much of what I seem to gravitate towards a few things in games:
Turn based combat, and other elements that are combat-free (e.g. exploration or character dialogue). I tend to lose interest in real-time combat very rapidly, as there’s usually one or two core ways to approach things - and it’s usually a pointy thing or a shooty thing. I am not massively into combat, so anything that turns things into a puzzle… that’s what keeps my attention. I like the satisfying moment where things click and I can feel really good about using the game’s systems well, or when I use everything available really well. This can happen in real-time games (Avowed and Outer Worlds do the pause menu thing for instance), but I just like the emphasis on me working my way through things in a very logical way. Wasteland 3 is a game I’d say also gave me this feeling, it was just nice to play late at night, no reaction-time needed, just a nice relaxing puzzle to solve.
I loved that the party members each brought something new to the game, but equally I felt most choices of party members would mesh okay or stack in some new unexpected way. It must have been a nightmare to balance things so that it’s relatively “fair”, or that there’s not a class that is compulsory in order to progress. I liked also that Steamworld had support abilities for a lot of classes (except that dastardly flanker crow, which was so in character!), and I felt like I was a genius for plotting out “okay, but I need this character to do X to trigger Y, so you stay there, and then you use this turn to do…”. It was something I loved in Baldur’s Gate 3 also.
Something I didn’t truly appreciate until the end of Steamworld Heist 2 was the level design. It’s such a “simple” premise that I imagine it could be dull if you always fought in say a plain arena each time. The variety of terrain types, mission structures, area effects, and even splitting up the party kept things really fresh, and I loved how they did a lot within a pretty straightforward design language. It was a slow thing for me to realise, but I think that the level design was something I enjoyed most about the game in hindsight.
However, I think it would be a amiss to not say that the story played a big part in me staying invested and enjoying the game. The way the story played out fit the game’s systems, and the way that characters constantly reacted or had things to say made me quite happy. It’s a linear game, and the story isn’t a multi-layered extravaganza, but… I had fun, and it did exactly what it needed to - I felt connected to the characters, the world around them, and was at times thoroughly surprised by some of the twists on the way.
This isn’t as much a review as me monologuing about why I enjoyed the second Steamworld Heist game. It got me thinking about why I like games, and what I’d like to create too. :)
