SteamWorld Heist
Turn Based Shooter
1 Player
System: PS4
Developer: Image & Form
Year of Release: 2016
Beaten: February 3rd, 2017
It's a god damned crime I haven't gotten around to writing this sooner. Immediately upon seeing the first trailer I was sold on the concept. You and your rag-tag group of robot space pirates go from ship to ship fighting other robots in a weird turn based shooter kind of style. It looked unique, and while I was a little wary that the gameplay might feel stale it never wound up feeling that way to me.
Since I'll probably never write about it on it's own I may as well address SteamWorld Dig. The SteamWorld series is a weird collection of games, just recently I discovered that Heist is the third entry. The first was a small tower defense game on the short lived DSiware, though it's also available on the 3DS eshop as well. It looks like a fairly standard tower defense game, a genre I really dislike, and as such I'm not sure if I'll ever play it. I do love the series, so there is a chance. The second game, Dig, is all about digging, shocking. You play as a steambot who digs his way underneath a town, collecting minerals and jewels and earning upgrades and helping to build up the town. Eventually you wind up digging deep enough to discover some truths about the world. I don't really recall as I played it years ago, but it's a pleasant enough little romp that has a surprising amount of gameplay available considering the seemingly simple premise. It's worth checking out if it sounds at all interesting.
The intro cinematic for Heist explains that the world exploded and the robots are now living in spaceships, trying to chain together the remnants of their dead Earth in a sad attempt to bring normalcy back to their existence. So that town you built up in Dig, well. It doesn't bode well for them. Heist starts off right in the thick of things. A battle has gone wrong as you and only one other crew mate has survived. This is slightly confusing as the fight you actually witness is quite simple due to being a tutorial, but I guess we are coming in at the tail end of a bloodbath.
Gameplay is fairly simple, like most turn based strategy games you can move and perform an action, or you can sprint and move twice as far. Your action usually consists of shooting your gun, but there are buffs, heals, grenades, and some other options as well. Before you shoot you're able to adjust your aim up and down, this is what made me take notice of the title. This system allows you to get all kinds of neat ricochet trick shots. Some guns come with laser sights, but most don't, and as such it does a really good job of replicating the difficulty of using a gun. Up close it's easy to just point and shoot, but what about that guy across the room. Sure, you can hit him, but you've got to carefully aim in order to hit him. And when you do it is marvelous. Luckily, the AI is built in such a way to emulate human error, er steambot error. I can't imagine going up against perfect aimbots would be much fun, although many out there are more masochistic than I am.
While there isn't much customization you get a varied enough crew of varying classes, with some repeats. As your characters level up they gain new skills ranging from passive buffs, to whole new abilities to use in combat. Usually you're constrained to just three robots, though certain bots allow up to four, or force you to tackle it solo. As you beat levels you'll pick up boxes filled with water (currency) as well as weapons and accessories. Each character can equip certain weapons and two accessories as well, these act as further passive boosts more often than not. There is a tight limit on how many things you can hold and you'll quickly learn which weapons and items you want to hang on to, and what needs to go. There are three decently sized overworld maps which consist of battles, stores and sometimes just story progression.
The main character, Piper, leads her group of, let's face it, bandits against even worse bandits before turning her sights on taking down the corrupt robot government who is oppressing your average steambot which leads her to discover an evil alien species which threatens all of steambot kind. It's simple, but the plot is entertainingly light. Plus the text is easy to skip through if you really aren't digging it at all. The best part is when you find a bar, or beat a boss and weird songs start playing that explain what's happening in the game world. They're quirky and I enjoyed them a great deal.
There's a single bit of worthwhile DLC for the game called the Outsider. It's a decent amount of content, adding a few combat levels to each overworld, as well as a new character with a really cool ability and a bit more lore sprinkled throughout. The character is really different in that as they kill steambots they build a charge which increases the strength of their abilities, from a room clearing lightning blast, to a self-healing ability. They're very powerful, but not overly so. Overall, I'd recommend picking it up along with the base game as, if it wasn't for the little DLC icon on the selection screen, you couldn't even tell which levels were added in. It's a great seamless addition.
SteamWorld Heist is an excellent little turn based action game. It's got humor, it's got robots, it's got a fairly creative combat system and it's got hats. I forgot to mention the hats! They don't do anything, but you can shoot off enemies hats and wear them to become more dapper. I don't really get it either, but HATS. It's now available on most current systems and it's well worth checking out. I'm mad at myself for not only waiting so long to pick it up, but also for waiting even longer to write about it. I loved all my time with SteamWorld Heist. It was one of those games where I would only play so much at once so as to make it feel like it lasted longer. Really though, the length is perfect for the game, and if you're really craving more there's a new game plus mode to check out as well.
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