It's the first SteamWorld Game that just didn't ever click with me. I think the two biggest killers here are the pacing and combat design. I felt bored of the dungeon layouts and movement between areas. Battles move at snails pace making it feel like a requirement to hold down fast forward. It made the overall experience pretty rough.

The deck building and core strategies that come with it also leave a lot to be desired. It presents a decent variety of combinations that are limited by its rules. To simplify, for the 3 characters in your party each have a card limit that combine into your deck. The limit is very strict. It also doesn't help that when a character goes down you can't use those characters cards for the rest of combat. This can lead to boss fights where if one character in your party goes down you might as well wipe. The balance in this game is completely off.

It still has that SteamWorld charm that I love. Character designs aren't as strong but the artstyle is great, music is nice and the writing is charming. I made it halfway through the game before stopping. At the time of writing SteamWorld Heist 2 got announced and all I could think about is how much I would rather play that leading me to drop this one.

I don't dislike this game. In fact, I like the presentation, the style, maybe even the characters a little bit. Unfortunately, I can't compel myself to keep playing it.

The card/deck nature of the game is what put me off. I put it on hardmode to ensure it was a bit of a challenge, but after dying to the 2nd boss 5~ times, I noticed one of the major reasons for failing was not getting the cards that would have been immediately useful. At this point, I also noticed one of the things I would have to be doing was min-maxing the character decks for individual encounters. Some cards are just not useful at all in certain encounters. AoE cards in fights where there's not reliably multiple enemies to hit is a major one.

This is unnecessary busy work as far as I'm concerned. One can think of this feature as having to pick and choose your cards carefully, making sure you have a good mix of power and utility in order to ensure success. I don't see it that way at all. I never once felt like I had to sacrifice anything. I felt like there was merely a perfect set of cards for every encounter, and it was extremely easy to choose.

So while I don't dislike the game, I do dislike everything the cards and deck-building contributes. I gave it about 3 hours of my time before giving up. My understanding is this game is quite short, so I could probably have just pushed through it. But... I don't want to.