SteamWorld Heist II Breaks All the Rules of Strategy Games to Build Something Better

Turn-based tactics games tend to be stressful affairs. Aliens could be invading Earth or the fate of the world could hang on a group of disgraced soldiers. In a game where every move carries the potential for total destruction, it makes sense that so many match their dire stories with bleak tones throughout. Then there’s SteamWorld Heist II, a tactics game about a crew of robot pirates cracking jokes and shooting foes’ hats off their heads in battle, all while jaunty tunes play on the soundtrack.

The story of SteamWorld Heist II follows Captain Quincy Leeway, living perpetually in the shadow of his mother, the legendary Krakenbane — which is a source of some introspection but a lot more jokes at his expense. The game’s playful presentation might make it seem like it’s leaning into a simpler sort of strategy, but SteamWorld Heist II blends its sense of humor with satisfying strategic combat featuring a cast of highly customizable characters.

Boarding Party

SteamWorld Heist II doesn’t even look like a strategy game at a glance. Rather than using the top-down perspective of most tactics games, SteamWorld Heist II takes place on 2D levels that look more like stages in platformers than typical battlefields. And instead of simply selecting an action from a menu and watching it play out, you need to manually aim every shot. That means every turn tests not only your strategic abilities, but also your skill at finding the exact right angle to do as much damage as possible. Those two quirks also enable SteamWorld Heist II’s defining mechanical trick — the ability to bounce bullets off the environment to hit targets even when they’re hiding in total cover.

Put all that together and you have a strategy game where every turn gives you the chance to pull off a maneuver that feels like magic. At the same time, you’re never really safe even when hunkered down between barricades, which adds a sense of thrill and danger. Where some strategy games can become a battle of attrition with rounds dragging on as each side picks away at the other’s health, SteamWorld Heist II is fast and lively, rewarding bold moves over playing it safe.

That’s all true of the original SteamWorld Heist as well, and the sequel finds some clever ways to make its unique combat even better. The biggest change this time around is a class system that lets you swap characters’ roles by giving them new weapons. Equip a submachine firearm and you get a fearsome Reaper capable of multiple attacks in one turn. Give a character a rocket launcher and they become a Boomer with a penchant for blowing things up without getting caught in the blast themselves. No, not that kind of Boomer.

Each class has its own skill tree, but party members can enable a limited number of abilities they’ve earned on any class using a resource called Cogs, letting you build custom characters with wild skill sets. You might stack movement abilities to turn your Engineer into a highly mobile combat medic, for instance, or pile defense and explosion-enhancing skills on your Brawler to turn them into a nearly indestructible grenade-lobbing tank. The system takes a bit too long to hit its stride, since it takes a while to gain enough skills and the Cogs required to enable them, but once you’ve gained a few levels in multiple classes, you can essentially build a whole new set of characters for each mission if you want to.

Being able to tinker with your party members’ builds is also what keeps the game from faltering when the pace starts to drag. After a bit of a slow start, Heist quickly picks up steam, but has a few periods of slow pacing toward the middle. Multiple twists in the story introduce new threats, opening up areas of the map and sometimes requiring you to head back through regions and even missions you’ve already completed. You’re often asked to complete a certain number of missions to boost your reputation with a faction before progressing, and there’s just not enough variation in missions to keep these gauntlets from growing a bit stale. It was never enough to really dull my enjoyment of the game, but there were points where it felt a bit like busywork, however fun the core combat remains.

Terror on the High Seas

The way you move between missions is another massive change from the first SteamWorld Heist. This time around, you’re given a pilotable submarine you use to cruise the high seas (and under them, once you’ve retrieved an air tank). At first, this is just a way to move from one mission to the next, but as the game goes on, it becomes an essential part of the experience. SteamWorld Heist II’s world map is vast, and exploring it to find hidden items and other secrets is a delightful change of pace from battle.

You soon start running into enemy ships, which you need to battle or evade to reach your objectives. Like your characters, your sub is customizable, with torpedoes, cannons, and other weapons that can be added, along with better armor and engines. Each weapon either slots onto the front, top, or sides of the sub, and they need to be aiming at your target to fire. That turns naval battles into a slightly silly affair of wheeling your ship around to line up targets, but it’s engaging nonetheless, and only becomes more fun once you gain the ability to submerge and get the jump on your enemies.

While its battles get complex quickly, SteamWorld Heist II could appeal to strategy newbies as much as genre fans. Its charming sense of humor keeps things feeling light, and it also includes a generous take on difficulty. Failing a mission just means restarting without any permanent consequences, and you’re free to customize enemy damage, spawn rates, accuracy and more to fine-tune the difficulty to your liking.

That it does all that without compromising its strategic depth is a feat in itself, and its unique 2D take on the genre further entrenches it as a one-of-a-kind experience. SteamWorld Heist II’s great tactical battles and sense of humor make it hard to imagine anyone not being won over by it, whether you’re a fan of strategy games or not.

8/10

SteamWorld Heist II launches on PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and PC on August 8. Inverse reviewed the game on PC.

INVERSE VIDEO GAME REVIEW ETHOS: Every Inverse video game review answers two questions: Is this game worth your time? Are you getting what you pay for? We have no tolerance for endless fetch quests, clunky mechanics, or bugs that dilute the experience. We care deeply about a game’s design, world-building, character arcs, and storytelling come together. Inverse will never punch down, but we aren’t afraid to punch up. We love magic and science-fiction in equal measure, and as much as we love experiencing rich stories and worlds through games, we won’t ignore the real-world context in which those games are made.