SteamWorld Heist II Reviews

Too tedious, long animations, sooooo much talking, and tons of really slow camera pans every time anything happens in the game. You can skip them, but it's not instant and even after skipping everything it can take a while for the game to catch up, plus you then of course miss whatever was actually happening. Could really use a speed slider for these things so I can have it quickly show me what just spawned. Plus the game commits the cardinal sin of the 'Skip Dialog' button and 'Repeat Dialog' button being the same damn button. Missions get super tedious by zone 3, with swarms of really annoying infinite-spawning enemies that suck to fight, and more 'survive x time' missions. Especially annoying are the enemies that drop totems - one of which you have to destroy instantly or it will infinitely spawn more and more enemies each turn that bog you down and prevent you from destroying the totem, effectively providing an instant loss. The ship game-play doesn't really add anything, the characters and story are much less interesting, and while I like the changes to the class system, the game is overall significantly less fun the Heist 1. Music is good though.

Great tactics game with fun and engaging gameplay, not bad, even though, intentionally naive narrative. A very strong indie title or even series!

A wonderful experience. Good story, fun and creative gameplay and mechanics. My only complaint is the lack of save-scumming, replaced by a "go 2 turns back". Took my approximately 55 hours to finish, completing all missions with full reputation.

Bloody great game once it gets going, start is a bit slow. As someone who struggles to stay interested in most games, this one hooked me. At first didn't like the changes from the first game but once you accept the differences it's really fun its own way to build out characters with different classes... There's some broken combos like Sniper Engineer and yeah just finding good synergies is fun as hell. Was hooked for the whole campaign and gonna go back and do the highest difficulty next.

SteamWorld Heist 2 was a bit of a mixed bag for me, as it shares what I consider to be the main weakness of it's predecessor; the difficulty scaling is complete nonsense. At the start of the game you feel like you can comfortably manage most missions, and as you unlock more characters and level them up you will need to experiment with your classes and builds to get through most of the missions flawlessely, which is what I consider good game design, and was a lot of fun. But at some point the game just starts throwing more and more enemies, hazards and time limits in your face until it gets to the point where anything but the classes that can move fast and precisely take out enemies in one shot almost gets redundant. One of the missions that had me give up for a couple of days has infinite reinforcements, extra enemies hidden in ice blocks that gets released if the ice blocks are destroyed, and a bunch of enemies spawning totems that summons even more enemies. AoE weapons are out the window because of the aforementioned ice blocks being placed on every second tile, snipers will just get swarmed by enemies, and if you try to rush through with faster characters, the enemies who create totems can also create ligthning totmes which damage you anywhere on the map, meaning you can't just rush through, you have to deal with those. A lot of those missions felt more like it was up to random chance (what totems the enemies used), than something I could control. I generally enjoy the challenge of having to try different builds and tactics to get through a game, but at some point I was just frustrated and tired of it, so I turned down the difficulty to easy and rushed through the last quarter of the game. I did however really enjoy my time with it up until the point where it got frustrating, so if you can live with the stupid difficulty curve, I can recommend this.

Amazing strategy game with a compelling story and addictive gameplay

This game has great mechanics, combined with a fun proper world to live in. With 5 different classes to choose from and each mission having bonus objectives as puzzles at times, the missions never grow boring. In addition, the world map is fun to explore with your little submarine and each crew member has some lore about them. The tutorial to start the game is also well made, with little hints but no real railroading on how to approach the first couple of things One can tell this game is made with passion and it is genuinely a fun game

Eh, has potential but misses so many marks. the gear system, while intriguing, essentially forces you to replay old missions countless times to level them up enough to get good crosspathing. the mission rewards, specifically the xp are just kinda slapped on. There's a mission you can complete in the beginning that takes literally 15 seconds, you get 10xp. Then the "final" mission of the first area takes like 15 minutes, much, much harder, and guess what. You get 10xp. What? the missions themselves aren't really fun. When playing turn based tactile games like xcom or bg3, most of the enemies you deal with are there from turn 1. Occasionally you will be ambushed or whatever. But in this game it's impossible to be "tactical" because enemies are constantly just randomly spawning all across the maps. Meaning without prior knowledge, having the right characters in the right place is impossible on the first run, forcing you to replay the same missions until you learn enemy spawn patterns. also the aiming is garbage

Good game! Got a bit annoyed over a difficulty spike at a certain point, but once I let go of the feeling of having to perfect every mission and instead revisit them after level up the game was alright again. It does get a bit tedious with the backtracking and the sleep mechanic, but overall it's a fun experience. Runs flawless under Proton.

The guy who came up with the "you need to rest before you can fight again" mechanic needs to be fired