SteamWorld Heist is a decent tactics game that misses the mark a bit. Gameplay overall is decent, there’s plenty of mechanical depth in its movement system and positioning. Aiming your weapons and knowing where to stand and aim is crucial to understanding this game’s mechanics. This is inverse to most tactic games where hit chance is determined by stats, this game’s hit chance is mostly determined by where you are in the map and if you as the player can aim and hit your target accurately. This makes for a fun risk and reward system where you have to decide whether to move closer in order to get better accurately while at risk of getting hit, or to move further away, reducing your accuracy while gaining more cover. This is all well and good, but a big problem with this game is that its levels are procedurally generated. It makes every single level in the game mostly feel the same as the other. It’s not too big of a deal as the game is overall fairly short, but it does let me down a bit because the gameplay could’ve been way more interesting than it is. In addition to this, inventory management is a nightmare. I constantly feel like I don’t have enough space to store anything and you get lots of rewards after nearly every level. This results in the player having to sell something practically after every single level which gets annoying to do. Story is nothing to write home about, everything is fairly standard and quite honestly I began to ignore it as the game went on as it feels very superficial and shallow with not a lot of depth. In conclusion, this game is decent, but does take a few missteps that bog down the experience.

I haven't played many turn-based RTS games but I was willing to give this one a try because I love the Steamworld Dig games. I spent a lot of time going through each level trying to get a perfect rank and also collecting the wide variety of hats available. I wish there were a few more UI adjustments such as the ability to easily see what difficulty you beat a level on. New Game + is a bit of a disappointment since it all it does is let you start with all of the characters and carry over your hat collection. However, these are minor complaints since the overall game is solid and wrapped in that beautiful Steamworld aesthetic.