SteamWorld Heist 2 review – the return of this tactical gem feels a little lost at sea

Cor, it feels good to be ricocheting hats off chrome skulls again, let me tell you. It’s been almost ten years since the original SteamWorld Heist showed us how XCOM could work in a 2D play space, and Thunderful’s sequel has only doubled down on what made this particular bag of bolts such a joyful offshoot in the turn-based strategy genre. Case in point: the hats that you could whizz off the head of your enemies and claim for your own (for no other reason than sheer cheekiness) are back in full force, with 101 of them ready to be pilfered in your search for tasty loot. Its new cast of characters are also daft and brilliant in equal measure, and I’m not ashamed to admit that one of my first recruitment decisions was based purely on the pun work. Why yes, Dame Judy Wrench, I will have you on my crew with your Harsh Language special attack that can shame an enemy for three damage. Why is that even a question?

SteamWorld Heist 2 isn’t just more of the same, though – even if that is a large part of its overall appeal. Apart from the shift in setting from space to a more explorable and connected ocean planet, there’s a new class system that lets you pinch skills learned in other jobs you’ve undertaken. Of course, Heist 2 isn’t the first game to land on this particular idea, and its execution is perhaps only partially successful in practice (more on that in a sec). But given this sequel is easily double the size of the original, it does need some form of progression support like this to help prevent its missions from buckling under the weight of its lengthy environmental crisis story. In truth, that reach for something bigger and better is arguably SteamWorld Heist 2’s undoing in many ways, but what’s here is still eminently enjoyable – and you’re certainly not left hungry.

Let’s start with the good stuff. Aside from its copious array of optional headwear to parade and pilfer, the heists themselves are as sharp and thrilling as ever. In your bid to find out what’s causing this world’s freshwater shortage (salt water doesn’t play nice with a Steambot’s metal work, after all), you’ll be raiding all manner of moored ships, rigs and naval facilities to find the source of the problem. Unsurprisingly, there are several hiccups, detours and other obstacles you’ll need to deal with along the way, taking you from the balmy, tropical shallows to deep, icy northern trenches and more – which you’ll pootle around in your trusty submarine in real-time, travelling from one mission to the next on the high seas.

But even though the interiors of many missions borrow from the same visual building blocks as one another, your objectives within them always feel fresh and varied. Perhaps you’ll come across the treasure hoard guarded by two brother bots that you have to tackle with just a lone crew member, for example, or the level where your team of four gets split into two as you race to disable an alarm system at opposite ends of the rig. Other times you’ll need to simply survive a wave of enemies while an NPC you’re trying to bust out of jail cracks the locked door leading back to your evacuation point. Or maybe you’ll find yourself in a tight warren of corridors that are stacked to the brim with evil totem poles that will deal you extra shock damage if you hit one. Heck, even when the objective is just ‘grab the swag and get out of there’, just the crew you decide to take with you can make a world of difference to how you approach it.

It captures that same kind of open-ended strategic sandbox vibe as 2023’s superb Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, though it stops short of creating the same kind of opportunities that game offered for specific character classes. Rather, SteamWorld Heist 2 trades in more generalised mission furniture that can be utilised by anyone – your classic exploding barrels, for example, or ice barrels (as well as icicles) that give bots a chill to make their aim jitter alongside their shivery body. That’s partly because, like the first game, its enemies and where they appear on the map are randomised every time you load up a level, making it impossible to create those kinds of bespoke scenarios. In truth, thinking on your feet and adapting your plans to what’s in front of you is all part of what made the original Heist so charming in the first place, and the strength of this sequel’s individual character classes are enough to make even its most vanilla settings still feel compelling.

Take the Flanker – a class which returns wholesale from the first game, and one of my personal favourites. With their increased movement range, these shotgun-based bots are the closest you ever get to feeling like you’re outright cheating. They’re deliciously back-stabby, and are dab hands at hoovering up all the sacks of loot you encounter, too, especially once you unlock their Payroll ability that gives them a free movement turn when you grab a sack of treasure. They can cover vast swathes of a map this way, and if you combine them with a Sniper, whose glorious long aim lines let you pull off frankly ludicrous tricks shots that can ricochet off multiple surfaces for another well-timed hit from the rear, gosh, that’s a real power-bot couple right there. Throw in an explosives expert for good measure, and they’ll be cooking in no time.

That said, it is a shame that jobs are now tied to weapons instead of the bots themselves. While this means changing jobs is as easy as simply equipping a different weapon, your recruits do lose some personality as a result. Each one still possesses a couple of unique qualities (even though one of them remains locked until quite some way into the game), but they feel dwarfed by the number of universal abilities available through each job’s skill tree. The first Heist went for fixed characters instead, offering a much more interesting set of weapon, body type and ability combinations. For instance, you could have two Sentries that encompassed both a sniper and a rocket launcher expert, or Vanguards who specialised in sharpshooting handguns or tank-like melee abilities. They all felt like unique creations, but here, anyone can be anything, providing far less incentive to spend increasing amounts of currency on any more new recruits once you’ve settled on a handful of favourites. After all, would you leave Dame Judy Wrench out on the subs bench?

There is still good reason for persisting with swelling your ranks, however, and that’s because once a crew mate has gone out and completed a mission, they’re then out of action until you rest at one of the bars strewn about the ocean. You’re free to do this as often as you like, but if you want to claim some of the game’s juicier rewards through its new Bounty system, then you’ll want to try and eke out as many missions as you can before hitting the hay. Bounty Points (and story-critical Reputation stars) are mostly earned by completing missions, though you can also scrape one or two extras of each by taking down evil Navy flagship boats or finding the occasional floating treasure chest. It’s a fine enough theory on paper, but I’ve also had occasions where I’ll have spent multiple missions’ worth of bounty points on what I thought was a great new weapon purchase, only to immediately find a rarer, more superior version as loot in the next level.

There are also ample opportunities to simply buy new weapons at these bars with your stocks of freshwater, though you’ll likely only ever have enough for a single purchase during any one visit. That’s because you’ll also need to spend your gallons of freshwater currency on submarine upgrades because, as you might expect, the open seas aren’t too friendly for a gang of heisters. Simply getting from one mission to the next can be fraught with danger if your sub’s not sufficiently decked out – and if it gets blown to smithereens, your Bounty Points go with it. Some players will no doubt thrive on taking the risk, but when everything is so hard won in SteamWorld Heist 2, the urge to turtle and play defensively (or just keep resting so you can continually field your favourite all-stars) starts to chip away at its more daring intentions.

Progress in general is quite slow throughout SteamWorld Heist 2, whether that’s having enough currency or building up your reputation to advance the story, or even simply levelling up. In its attempt to go bigger and better, there’s a feeling it’s spread itself too thinly in the process, and with a sharp difficulty spike around the 12-15 hour mark, each heist starts to feel progressively less like a fun, cheeky outing to steal some treasure, and more like an openly hostile grind where you barely escape with your life. Technically, there’s no penalty for aborting a mission and simply trying again – only your time, which itself can feel particularly painful when you’ve spent 45 minutes doing a pitch-perfect heist, only for it start unravelling moments from your evacuation.

For me, the cause of these disasters wasn’t usually bad planning (or at least it never felt like it), but rather getting caught out by its alarm system, which is almost always present in one form or another, and which counts down to beefier and beefier reinforcements arriving the longer you spend in a level. As with any kind of heist game, the threat of things getting out of hand does build and keep the pressure up in most cases, but there are definitely some missions where the balance of the alarm seems deliberately designed to outpace you until you simply can’t keep up with the numbers anymore. Missions where the swag bags you’ve got to loot are strewn across all corners of the ship, for example, or when you’ve got three mini-boss targets (also at opposite ends of a level) with honking great health bars and a plentiful supply of existing minions to throw in your direction. A heist game wouldn’t be anything without a bit of pressure like this, and for the most part, Heist 2 walks this line well. But for me, at least, there were one too many occasions where it felt like it was asking just a little too much for the toolset I’d already worked quite hard to build up.

On death, you only ever get the option to go back two turns, too – which regularly left me in some quite sticky situations that even Dame Judy Wrench couldn’t blast me out of (and trust me, I really tried on one mission, until I got biffed in a single turn, at which point the game told me there were no more checkpoints to return to, so I simply had to give up and try again). In that moment, I would have given my right arm to have something like Shadow Gambit’s quick-loads to ease the pain of defeat. But heck, even the option to choose which turn to restart on would’ve been so much more respectful of my time.

And yet, another ping of grazing a new hat to the ground will bring me right back out of these doldrums, reminding me that, yes, I do really like this game very much. The core of what I loved about the original is still very much present and correct, and in those moments, Heist 2 wipes that near-decade absence clean again. But there’s no denying you can see the machinery straining beneath the surface this time. Even the dialogue – usually a highlight of SteamWorld games – feels too verbose and padded out here, and it bogs down a plot that already has one too many spanners in there throwing it off course. In shooting for that longer run-time, I do fear that its pacing hasn’t struck quite the right balance. Perhaps a future update might help to grease the wheels on this front, easing the burden of its alarm system, or making it feel less like it’s immediately put kid gloves on when dropping down from the default Experienced difficulty to Moderate. As it stands, though, SteamWorld Heist 2 feels like a battleship with its anchor down. It’s got everything it needs to go out guns blazing and hats akimbo, but it’s run aground under the weight of its ambition.

A copy of SteamWorld Heist 2 was provided for review by Thunderful Publishing.