And now for an extremely biased write up about a game I’ve been looking forward to for awhile. When I went to PAX East earlier this year I met Julius Goldberg who is the Community Manager at Image & Form. Him and I had a 5-10 minute long conversation about games, life, and everything else. He was the nicest person I’ve ever met and left a last impact on me. When I got up to the booth to actually play the game I met Marco Podda, Publishing & Project Manager, who saw me waiting in line for awhile and asked me if I was ready to play. I had told him about watching others before me and demo footage of the level I was about to play and of my past history with the SteamWorld series of games and how excited I was to finally get to play the game with my own two hands. While standing in line and talking to Julius I was able to get my Indiebox copy of the first SteamWorld dig signed by the two gentlemen. If you two guys ever read this I’d like to thank you for your kindness and care, the world needs more people like you. Now that we having my gushing out of the way let’s talk about the game and if it lived up to my lofty expectations.
SteamWorld Dig 2 takes places after the first game where that game’s hero Rusty goes missing at the end. We pick up the story with Dorothy, a young steambot on a mission to find her friend Rusty. The gameplay loop is the same for the most part wherein you dig through mines collecting gems, going back up to town, selling your gems, then using your cash to purchase upgrades so you can stay in mines longer and stay safer down there. What really excited me was the new upgrade cog system for your tools. Along with many other secrets to be found in the game you can find cogs that can be added up and put into slots to give you bonuses such as a larger light radius, quicker pickaxe swings, and lots of other cool things. I’m not one to go out of my way to find secrets or 100% complete a game but I can absolutely see myself going back through and picking up things I had missed.
If I had to give one criticism it would be that the story beats felt the exact same as the last game. The last game was rather short and in the end it boils down to having to find 3 things in previous areas and destroying them. In this game the situation ends up being the same but the game is longer this time which is great. The game is also a metroidvania in a sense and not having played many of those types of games personally, I’m not sure if this is just a staple of the genre such as grinding in a JRPG or quick time events in a first person shooter. Having a sense of exploration and addictive loop made me look past the shortcomings of the story since a game like this I’m going to play for the gameplay anyways and not look for a long, tedious story.
SteamWorld Dig 2 was an absolute blast to play. I felt like every time I would tell myself “just one more time into the mines” I would end up playing for another 30 minutes and 10 more trips. Being on the Switch it was nice to be able to give myself more time to really explore every corner of the game world and see what I could find if I just went a little deeper. I’d like to thank Image & Form for making such a fun game to play and explore in.
No comments:
Post a Comment