![]() Your squad takes it in turns to move around the current ship you are exploring. The combat itself is quite straightforward. Earn enough experience an your bots level up and learn a new skill to help them along the way. Once completed, any rewards an swag you collect along the way are assessed and you’re awarded experience points to each of the bots that tackled the mission (and survived). To ensure maximum replayability, each individual mission is set on board a procedurally generated ship so no two missions will ever play the same twice, even if you return to them at a later date. I won’t delve into the story itself as I’ll let you discover that for yourselves, but as you progress through it you’ll face increasingly tougher challenges, meet new bots to recruit to your crew, encounter weary traveller bots who will be only too willing to offer you help and advice (sometimes for a few drops of water) and the odd boss or two… With regards to the game itself, each mission presents you with set objectives from the offset ranging from taking out a ship’s defenses to collecting as much treasure as you can before escaping safely. When you take a small team into battle you really get drawn into each encounter and feel for your fallen crew, dreading each loss… no matter how temporary it may be (thanks to the wonders of your repair crew back on the ship who patch up even the most damaged of ‘bots). ![]() ![]() Despite the game having no voice over and all of the characters speech being represented by nothing more than blips and beeps, you quickly warm to the charms of each and every one of them. From your own crew to the random inhabitants of the galaxy that you meet to your evil adversaries, they’re all brought to (mechanical) life thanks to a great, witty script. Turn based games can often be quite bland and rather clinical in their approach but what really makes SteamWorld Heist stand out from the crowd is its cast of characters. From here you can see more information on the mission, choose your crew, select the weapons / accessories they will take with them and then start the exploration at hand… Once you have selected a mission you’re taken to the crew selection section. This will display all of the accessible missions on a grid and upon completing a mission you can travel to any of the adjacent ones on the map. Phew! The game starts off on your ship where you can talk to the rest of your crew or go to the Space Map where you can choose what location to fly to. SteamWorld Heist can be best described as being a turn-based strategic squad-based shoot-em-up. Most of the ships you try to explore aren’t as deserted as you’d like them to be so you have to fight your way through them for that vital cargo. You and your crew are only interested in one thing – exploring the (hopefully) empty ships in space, salvaging whatever drops of water you can find, and just surviving in the harsh emptiness of space. If only it were that easy. You’re one of these space-bound robots, Captain Piper Faraday, who is in command of a small salvage ship. ![]() ![]() This life would be bad enough if it weren’t for gangs hunting them down and trying to steal this precious water from them, power hungry factions, not to mention the turmoil going on in space… With no planet to call home, most of these Cowbots try to survive on desolate planets eking out whatever living they can by mining for moisture – searching for the rarest commodity of all… water. All that is left are a rag-tag handful of surviving robots scattered around the galaxy. Well, actually this time things have gone a bit further than that and our wonderful but ailing planet has been destroyed. Instead of focusing on what you would normally expect from the genre with a mechanical, alternatively-powered world, Image & Form have taken things further focusing their games around steam-powered robots… More accurately though, their games have a rather unique twist. In fact I’d be hard pressed to name more than half a dozen but Swedish developer Image & Form have made their name from releasing nothing but games focused around the steampunk genre. Steampunk games are few and far between on the PS Vita. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |