SteamWorld Heist is Image & Form’s follow-up to SteamWorld Dig, a game I was not too fond of when it came out. Dig was extremely addicting, but it did not feel all that substantive or genuinely fun to me personally when I gave it a few hours of my time last year. But while SteamWorld Dig was more of a platformer, Heist is a turn-based 2D strategy game, and it seems way better.

Mechanically, the game reminds me of Worms in its level structure. You take turns with your robot crew moving throughout a level, getting from beginning to end in a semi-linear fashion, able to move a certain number of steps each turn and conduct battle against enemies. While doing this, you have to be smart about angling shots, getting behind cover, and knowing when you can use explosives in the environment to your advantage. Piper, the leader of the gang, utilized a single-shot pistol with a laser pointer, while other teammates carried a shotgun and an auto-fire weapon. In addition to aforementioned hazard shooting and enemy killing, you can also shoot the hats off of enemies and collect them.

Heist goes out of its way to make the gameplay more accessible than Worms, as before you even move, the game will point out where you can fire a shot from and where you are will be safe from enemy attacks using color-coded paths.

Despite this, the game was rather challenging. Every room in the demo gradually ramped up the difficulty with more and more enemies coming from all directions. When one of your teammates goes down in combat, they’re down for the rest of the mission. By the end of the demo, after several rooms of me losing allies and health, I was left with a low-health one-man army against a bullet sponge of a boss and his crew, in a room where there was minimal room to hide. The optimal strategy, of course, required angling trick shots off the wall into some explosive barrels in ways that barely seemed possible. I ultimately lost at the end of the demo, but I wanted to try again immediately. Finding the right strategic angle to approach each room was really fun and fairly challenging, and I’m hoping that Image & Form manages to make these enemy rooms even more devious as the game progresses.

The demo had quite a bit of dialogue, though the noisy PAX East environment made it challenging to gleam what exactly the plot was. However, the developer I was talking to made it sound like Heist was going to be a relatively lengthy, story-driven experience. The writing and sense of humor was one of SteamWorld Dig’s strong-suits, so if SteamWorld Heist can offer more of that with level-based Worms-like strategy gameplay, I’m in.