SteamWorld Heist II: Upgrading Greatness

It’s rare to see a new idea nailed on the first try, but 2015’s SteamWorld Heist very much managed it. In an age where squad-based tactical games like XCOM were hugely popular, Heist asked a bold design question – how do you do that, but in 2D? The result was an experiment gone very, very right – a tight-knit strategy experience that saw turn-based tactics given a freeform twist, where you controlled the precise angle of every gunshot, performing outrageous ricochet trickshots, striving to achieve perfectly executed spaceship heists, and desperately grabbing loads of collectible hats.

Sadly, the original Heist never made it to Xbox consoles, but I’m very happy to say that its sequel will arrive on your console or PC tomorrow, August 8. SteamWorld Heist II returns with a new design question – how do you make a sequel to something that felt so complete? The answer is to keep the core of the action intact, and make everything around it bigger and better. Relocating the action from outer space to the sea, SteamWorld Heist II offers a more explorable world, more player choice, and new ways to tinker with your squad, all set amid a new robot-pirate aesthetic.

Returning players will immediately notice how much more expansive this seems – where the first game saw you travelling down a broadly linear map of missions, you now control a dinky submarine, physically guiding your vessel across the seas, taking down enemy ships in miniature real-time battles, and choosing where you want to head next. Missions are plentiful, and come in many forms – some will see a whole squad having to survive for a set number of turns, others will have you pitting a single character against a gauntlet of challenges.

Each mission still offers reputation (a currency that effectively unlocks your progress through the game), but also offers bounty points, which can be spent on a series of rewards. In a single in-game day, each squad member can only take part in a single mission – and you quickly realise there’s an art to making sure you squeeze in every mission possible, before sailing to a local bar for a rest, and a chance to claim all your bounties.

It’s a small mechanical decision with major ramifications – as you build your ragtag group of robots (hiring new ones along the way), you don’t just need to think about which set of weapons and abilities will go best together, but also which smaller groups can complement one another to allow you to take on as many missions as possible.

This leads us to another of Heist II’s big changes – any robot can take on any class by simply equipping them with the requisite weapon, but they can also transfer abilities from classes they’ve already levelled up. It allows you to tinker with your strategies to a minute degree – aided by the fact that every new character comes with personal abilities that only they can use.

Once you begin digging into the possibilities at your metallic fingertips, you’ll realize there’s an enormous flexibility here. Personally, I’ve been a huge fan of turning a crew member with the ability to fire a giant laser that pierces multiple enemies into a Flanker, offering them bonus damage for hitting enemies from behind – there’s nothing better than travelling across the map to line up a perfect shot and taking out three enemies at once.

It’s another bold move from a bold series – SteamWorld games have come in many different forms in the decade and more they’ve been around – and its latest incarnation shows no lack of that same ambition. This is bigger, longer, and more open to your interpretation than any SteamWorld game before, but still shows the same spark of genius that powered the original Heist. If you didn’t play the original, now’s the time to take a dive into SteamWorld Heist II’s perfect blue seas.

SteamWorld Heist II comes to Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and Windows PC on August 8.