#Steamworld heist review series#

But without the narrative for context I have always felt that all that effort had been largely wasted. Image & Form have some seriously talented artists on the team, and all SteamWorld games have had a gorgeous steampunk aesthetic.

#Steamworld heist review series#

One of the things I have been waiting for from the SteamWorld series is a proper narrative and sense of world building. Related reading: Read Brad’s take on SteamWorld Heist’s predecessor, SteamWorld Dig, here. From humble beginnings as a simple, but effective tower defense title in SteamWorld: Tower Defense on the DSiWare downloadable platform, to SteamWorld Dig, which was a breakaway success across almost every platform out there, we now have SteamWorld Heist, which is the most ambitious title in the IP to date, and in many ways it is the best yet. One of the most interesting mechanics is the fact that bullets can bounce off of walls, some weapons don’t but a lot of them do and something like a sharpshooter lets you use a scope to see where your bullet will end up and plan outrageous trajectories for your shot that feel great when pulled off – to make things a little bit harder your bots breathe moving the line of fire so timing things just right is important.Image & Form’s SteamWorld franchise has been steadily growing into a quality indie IP. Your bots come in a number of classes which can each use a handgun and one other of the different categories of weapon – for example Piper can use Sharpshooters – Sniper style weapons which have a huge range but don’t allow you to move and shoot in the same turn, effective use of a sharpshooter can lead to dominating a map but it requires you to move to the right location whilst Ivanski can use Heavy weapons which tend to blow stuff up and not worry about things like cover, getting to close will kill your own bots though so figuring out the right balance is crucial to success. The main draw of the visuals is the personality of its world and characters from those in your crew to your enemies (especially bosses). The art style of the Steamworld series from Image & Form is both cartoony and detailed, each bot is drawn very well and movement is handled well. In battle we get a nice set of sound effects from bullets ricocheting off of barrels to the sound of a shotgun spraying. There are 12 tracks that feature live recorded instruments and singing that works perfectly for this game and really adds to the atmosphere and environment more than we usually receive in this type of game – in fact the band themselves feature in the game as themselves and pop up as you travel to space bars across the setting. Instead our main audio experience comes from an epic soundtrack brought to us by Steam Powered Giraffe, a steam punk band that wrote some new tracks and tweaked existing ones to fit the universe of the game. Outside of a couple of short cutscenes that layout the story there is no voice acting in the game, our characters communicate with written dialogue. The dialogue throughout the game is well written and funny drawing me in, as I got further in I cared about my crew as a captain should! After the events of Steamworld Dig 2, the Earth is a sad place! Its a classic tale and the post-apocalyptic steampunk setting is perfect for it.

Along the way though the team get drawn into a bigger tale against the Royalists and become unwitting heroes. We take control of Captain Faraday Piper – a space pirate know as a “Cowbot” who starts in a tricky spot – most of her crew have been scrapped by Space Scrapers and she needs to rebuild a crew, get some water and move on. The Earth is shattered now and Steambots have been forced into space, working and scraping for water – the essential need for steambots to survive and as fuel for their ships.