SteamWorld Heist 2 review: "While sillier than XCOM's po-faced sci-fi, its mechanics are no less serious"

SteamWorld Heist 2 sits firmly in the center of the Venn diagram of XCOM players and hat fanciers. The side-on, turn-based tactical game puts you in charge of a crew of steampunk androids on a quest to save a world in the grips of a water crisis. More importantly, your enemies wear fancy hats that, with careful aim, you can shoot off and collect for your crew's wardrobe.

You really should be focused on finding the source of the corrupted water staining the oceans of the Great Sea and rusting the innocent SteamBots living on its coastline. After all, you're Captain Leeway, and you must make a name for yourself and your submarine crew as heroes of the high seas. But, if some hats get collected on the way, no one can get mad, right?

Blending styles

While SteamWorld Heist 2 is sillier than the po-faced sci-fi of XCOM and Phoenix Point, its mechanics are no less serious. Under its cartoon aesthetic and caricatured cast, it's a demanding class-based tactical game with high-skill combat. It's a great sequel for those who enjoyed the first game but also offers a fresh beginning for new players – not requiring any knowledge of its predecessor's story.

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SteamWorld Heist 2 splits its action between a real-time overworld and turn-based missions. In the overworld, you pilot Leeway's submarine around a luscious map dotted with Navy ships to destroy, floating wreckage to scavenge, and taverns offering gear to buy and recruits to hire. There's even a hint of a metroidvania to proceedings, with upgrades to your sub's engines and air tank opening up new areas.

As delightful as the overworld is, and it is a genuine pleasure to navigate Leeway's nippy submersible, circling ships with the thumbstick and gliding past enemy turrets with your boost, ultimately, it serves as a map connecting SteamWorld Heist 2's missions. It's there you'll advance the story, earn experience points to level up your crew, and find those sweet, sweet hats.

Taking Aim

Before each mission, you choose which crew members to take into battle and what weapons and tools to equip them with. It pays to take your time tweaking your squad loadout, especially on the higher difficulty levels. When your objective is holding off waves of enemies for a set number of turns, for instance, you'll want to take some additional armor and repair kits.

The fundamentals of SteamWorld Heist's turn-based combat will be familiar to players of the genre. Each turn, your crew members have two action points you can spend on movement, attacking, or abilities. Where the game differs wonderfully from most other turn-based tactical games is its aiming system. 

Many tactics games determine the success or failure of your shots with an abstract percentage value. Not so SteamWorld Heist 2: here, you do all your aiming by sight, nudging your character's weapon up or down with the right thumbstick. Some weapons, such as the sniper rifle, come with a laser sight, but with many, you must make your best guess at the trajectory – or hold a ruler up to the screen.

Complicating matters further, bullets ricochet off surfaces, with high-powered rounds zinging down corridors until they find a target. Joyfully, this opens up the possibility for trick shots. If a Navy officer is cowering behind a barricade, you can often angle a shot to ping off the ceiling and rain down on them from above. After you get to grips with aiming, every cluster of enemies becomes an opportunity to see how many you can hit with a single round. 

If you really want to test your skills, you'll need to start claiming hats. Every enemy in SteamWorld Heist 2, from the lowliest petty officer to the fleet admiral, goes into battle wearing headwear befitting their rank. Clip the hat with a bullet and you'll knock it to the ground, where a crew member can collect it. Hats are purely cosmetic, but it's amazing how often I put my crew into danger to grab an abandoned cap.

Re-engineered 

Thunderful Development has completely changed the class system for SteamWorld Heist 2. Previously, each character had a unique skill tree and access to two weapon types. Now, every crew member is effectively classless, with their skills tied to the weapon they're carrying, making them extremely adaptable. Take, for example, Daisy Clutch, your first crew member. She starts with a rifle and has access to the Sniper skill tree, but if you swap her rifle for a pistol, she becomes a healing Engineer. Give her a shotgun, and she's a highly mobile Flanker. 

As characters level up they unlock advanced abilities for the equipped role. High-level Snipers gain damage boosts for camping in one spot and can become invisible for a turn, sidestepping incoming fire. Swap to a different weapon type and you start fresh on its skill tree. However, crucially, you don't lose the experience gained on the previous weapon, and you can keep some old abilities active. In this way, you can create multi-class characters. My Daisy, for instance, spent time as a Flanker, earning the Backbiter ability, meaning all her shots that hit enemies in the back do extra damage and ignore armor.

As well as weapon abilities, each character has two unique skills that support particular playstyles. Tristan, for instance, is a natural Engineer because he doesn't spend action points when using repair kits. Whereas Chimey's Tit for Tat ability automatically damages any enemy who hurts her, making her great in the thick of the action as a hammer-wielding Brawler. There are more characters than you could ever recruit to your crew on one run, which is a great push to replay the campaign and see what other SteamBots have to offer.

One weakness of this generous class system, however, is how comparatively stingy SteamWorld Heist 2 is in awarding experience points. Switching classes has a clear cost because it takes multiple successful missions before characters earn enough XP to access the second and third-level skills of the new role. In a game where missions can take twenty minutes to complete and become increasingly tough later in the campaign, it's easy to balk at starting a character down a new skill tree. 

SteamWorld Heist 2 is almost the best kind of sequel. The fundamentals of its excellent free-aim combat remain the same. The class system, which previously offered little flexibility, has been overhauled. And new systems, such as the real-time overworld, breathe fresh life into the series. 

However, like the original game, SteamWorld Heist 2's campaign begins to drag long before it is over, with many of the missions revolving around familiar objectives: facing a high-health miniboss, stealing a piece of valuable loot, or surviving waves of incoming enemies for a set number of turns. The systems underneath keep SteamWorld Heist 2 engaging, as do the bonus objectives that push you to take risks within a mission. However, without more variety or a greater sense of pace in character progression, the campaign eventually becomes tired. SteamWorld 2 is a great game, full of charm and life, but it falls just short of being excellent.