What is Steamworld Heist?

Steamworld Heist is a Science Fiction-Adventure-Roleplay-Turn based Strategy-Shooting game in 2D. The developer is Image & Form Games, they made more games in the Steamworld setting and I’m tempted to get them all now. Steamworld Heist first came out in 2015. Available platforms at this moment are: PC, WiiU, Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo Switch, Playstation Vita & Playstation 4.

This game resolves around Captain Piper Faraday, she’s a smuggler and sometimes a pirate by necessity. During the game you’ll gather more crew, all of them colourfull characters and you’ll fight your way through enemy robots and spaceships. During this you level up your crew and gather new weapons and awesome hats!

I really enjoyed the game and am happy that I finally picked it up. I’m even trying to play through the game again on a higher difficulty then Regular, but no promises on finishing that. The last boss took me only two tries in the end, but I found it a challenge on regular difficulty already. I don’t think I’m ready to try it on a higher difficulty yet, so we’ll see if playing the whole game on a higher difficulty will get me ready for that.

Fun parts

• Colourfull characters in the crew and NPC’s.
• The setting, different types of robots in SPACE. It is set after the world exploded and the robots are the only ones left, trying to piece together Earth.
• Artstyle is very good, comic like and colourfull. I also loved the little cutscenes and storytelling in old-fashioned news style, it was very well done.
• Music is goooood. I love that all the bars have different songs to them. Also songs after you kill the bosses, I love it.
• HATS, stack ’em all! You can buy them, but I enjoyed shooting hats off of enemyheads to pick them up afterwards. Hats are fun! Get all those hats!
• Turnbased fights, with interesting mechanics. All the characters have their own cool stuff like focussing on close combat, lots of movement options, being able to fire multiple shots, or effectshots as snipers. There are robots that have the same class, but they feel different in combat, so I loved switching my party every mission.

Not so fun parts, minor issues or personal things I didn’t like.

• Sometimes the textbubbles on the routingscreen will overlap with a different goal on the route. You can avoid it by using the arrowbuttons to move, but sometimes I wanna hover over the places and read before I go there. A minor issue, but still.
• The mouse is locked within the gamewindow, I couldn’t find anyway to change it. When you’re playing the game on a second monitor like me, it’s sometimes annoying, although if your’re on one monitor, it’s a minor issue, if even an issue at all. For me, if I wanted to do something on my other monitor, I had to alt-tab which would also minimize the game automatically. It’s nothing game breaking, but it did seem weird to me.
• You can’t equip the party outside of the missionscreen. You can’t even look at what they are equipped with at the moment in the crewscreen. You have to look at your inventory and see there who the weapons and offhands are equipped to. I would have preferred to have been able to see that in the crewpage. A minor issue, but still.

And then some issues that have to do with eyesight, I have weird eyes, so this doesn’t have to be a problem for most people.

• When your crew levels up, they can unlock a new ability. I found the flash that happens with that, to be too bright. I solved it by looking away from the screen or closing my eyes when I pressed the button to unlock, but for me, the flash could have been a bit less bright.
• The camera moving to all the enemies when they arrive and when they’re doing their actions made my head dizzy towards the end, when there were lots of enemies on screen. The same for the turrets, the camera moved to all the places of the turrets when they were turned on (because of the threatlevel going up or the countdown hitting zero) and did that again, when they came out and started doing actions. For me an improvement would have been to skip the places of turrets before they come out. You could see the locations before that anyway and it seemed a bit overdone to do it like this. This is something that has to do with my eyes, so I can’t call it a huge problem, but for me it was not pleasant.

As I said before, the issues I had are all minor or personal. The visual issues are in essence also personal, so if you have no weird eyes like me, they won’t even count as issues. Overall it was such a fun experience. I can recommend this game to everyone who loves turnbased games, hat collecting, awesome comic like artstyle and good music.

Go and pick up Steamworld Heist if you’re interested!