Steamworld Heist 2 is set in the same world as the rest of the franchise. The planet Earth has gone kablooey, and steam-powered robots live on the shattered remains of the planet. The second game puts you in the steam-powered shoes of Captain Leeway, the one-armed son of a famous hero who once slayed a terrible beast. Eager to make his way in the world outside of his mother's shadow, he becomes a heroic pirate who scours the shattered seas of his home world. An illness is impacting steambots and causing them to rust and corrode from the inside out. That gives Leeway exactly the excuse he needs to become a hero on his own merits — if he can find a crew to work with him.

Steamworld Heist 2 has more of a plot than the first game, with a greater emphasis on various story beats, but it maintains the Steamworld franchise's excellence in highlighting the gameplay. That said, Heist 2 is a fun story with a lot of enjoyable characters and enough twists and turns to keep you engaged through Leeway's various adventures. I like the cast a lot, arguably more than the first game's, and they are a fun crew to adventure with.

The basic gameplay of Steamworld Heist 2 is very similar to the first game. It's best described as a 2D X-COM game, where the side-scrolling perspective is used to great effect. You deploy a team of four different steambots to the field, and you have to move them through the environment to take down enemies, collect loot, and escape intact. You're challenged to do this while not dying, and you're given a star ranking once the stage is finished. The star rankings unlock further plot progression and special shops.

Probably the most noteworthy thing about the game is that you manually aim your weapon, and weapons have different attributes that take advantage of that, such as bullets being able to bounce off multiple walls. This allows you to do insane trick shots that would make Revolver Ocelot proud, reflecting a sniper shot halfway across the stages to headshot an unlucky enemy. Careful aiming of bazooka shots can hit multiple enemies to easily turn a fight in your favor. A pistol might not do a lot of damage, but targeting enemy legs can freeze them in place for a turn, allowing one of your other characters to get close and bash them to pieces.

There are a lot of minor gameplay adjustments from the first game, and they add up. There's now a wider selection of potential missions with objectives that are more varied. Some missions might have you taking down bosses, others have you splitting up to go in multiple directions at once, or more. There's less of a constant rush through stages, which allows you to take things more slowly and offers more room for slower unit types to be functional; this was a problem in the first game. For example, the sniper units, who were a tad too slow in Heist, are the star of the show in Heist 2.

That said, unit types is more of a vague concept in Steamworld Heist 2. Each steambot has a unique skill and then has a job that is equipped, depending on the weapon they are using. Boomers use bazooka, brawlers use big hammers, engineers use pistols, flankers use shotguns, reapers use SMGs, and snipers use sniper rifles. Once equipped with a job, a steambot starts to gain experience points in that job and levels up, which unlocks new skills and abilities. Flankers can do bonus damage when attacking from behind, while snipers gain perfect accuracy and laser sight aim for one turn.

These abilities are permanently unlocked. Once you learn a skill, you can swap to another job and mix and match skills as you like. You have a certain number of points to spend, with each skill requiring a specific number of points, but the points are plentiful enough that you can create some genuinely crazy builds. A sniper can stack multiple damage buffing abilities to turn their high damage output into something truly crazy. On the other hand, the normally inaccurate reaper's SMG can become a laser-precise death machine by giving it the sniper's perfect accuracy. The more skills you unlock, the crazier the combinations are. By the end, I had brawlers who could march halfway across the stage and crush unlucky foes in a single turn and snipers who had enough bonuses and cooldown reduction that they were able to eliminate an entire squadron of boss-tier enemies in one shot.

The customization doesn't stop there. As mentioned, each different steambot has a unique skill that can be upgraded as you play the game. One of my favorites is a character who gains the ability to teleport anywhere on the stage, and when upgraded also becomes invisible for a turn. He begins as a sniper, which is great, but by making him into a reaper with some sniper skills, he could position himself in the exact right spot to burn through entire groups of enemies with no risk to himself. There are also various weapons that have distinct attributes, such as allowing you a bonus melee attack, setting enemies on fire, ignoring armor and other variables.

The job system is a lot of fun and really makes you think about everything the steambots can do. It also avoids the situation that the first game had, where you only want to use a small set of steambots. Since each one has a unique skill and can be heavily customized, there's no such thing as a bad steambot. They all excel at something, and there are a lot of game mechanics to make you use them all. My favorite character changed based on the specific moment in Heist 2, whereas in the original Heist, I ignored bots who had joined after I'd already completed my crew.

That's one area where Heist 2 has vastly improved. In the first game, it was too easy to stick with one squadron. In Heist 2, you can only deploy each steambot once per day, but you're given powerful items as rewards for doing multiple missions in one day. If you want to optimize rewards and get some of the best items, you'll need to use everyone. There are also upgrades that speed up the rate of mastering early levels of a job, so catching up newer steambots doesn't take as much effort. The only thing I don't like is that some of the job skills feel mandatory. The boomer skill that provides a third item slot is so essential that not having it leaves your steambot at a massive handicap. Thankfully, these skills are generally easy to learn and are primarily there to encourage players to swap jobs.

I mentioned that you only can deploy a unit once a day, and that's tied to the new world map. Rather than selecting stages from the map, you have a pilotable submarine to traverse the world map. This isn't just a fancy cursor, either. You'll find secret areas, avoid obstacles, and get into fights. Your ship can even be destroyed, but it replenishes all of its health when you stop and rest for the day. The more missions you do in a day, the more bounty points you gain; the points can be exchanged for powerful reward items, so the game encourages players to avoid the obvious tactic of resting after every stage.

Ship fights are simpler than regular fights. You can equip your ship with three weapons: one on the front, one on the top, and one on the sides. These weapons will fire automatically when you get near an opponent's ship. Enemy ships do the same to yours, though. Your goal is to circle the enemy ships so you're constantly firing on them from angles from which they can't counterattack, and you repeat this until they get destroyed. As the game progresses, there are some extra wrinkles tossed in, like laser weapons that require you to keep a bead on the enemy for a short period of time or weapons that don't work underwater. For the most part, you can upgrade to new weapons as you get them.

The new world map is something I'm not super excited about. There's some fun to be had in exploring the world and discovering new things, but it ends up feeling kind of one-note. The combat is not a very engaging counterpart to the incredibly good core gameplay. Enemy ships basically pose no threat or have no interesting challenges, and there's nothing that encourages you to build in any way other than what will yield the most damage per second.

Steamworld Heist 2 adopts the same colorful art style as the rest of the non-Build titles in the franchise, and it works well. The character models are colorful, bright and well animated, and while they are undeniably basic in places, it works very well for the atmosphere the game is striving for. An excellent soundtrack bolsters the charming cartoony graphics and makes the entire experience work very well. In particular, I love some of the character designs even more than those in the first game.

Steamworld Heist 2 is a full-on sequel to the first title. Overall, it's better in every way that matters: more weapons, more skills, more enemy types, more gameplay, and a lot of adjustments that make the game more fun to play. Only the new world map feels more like a lateral move than an actual upgrade, but it doesn't get in the way of the quality of the rest of the game. Steamworld's streak of excellent titles continues, and it makes me excited to see what the development team comes up with next.

Score: 9.0/10