Steamworld Dig 2

SteamWorld Dig 2: As Casual as You Want to Be

2017-09-29

SteamWorld Dig 2 is a “more but better” sequel to a mining metroidvania featuring Wild West-style folksy robots. It has lots of secrets and upgrades, a great map, and just the right about of collectibles. The player digs up resources they can trade for money to upgrade tools. Hidden cogs can be used to add mods to the tools. The game has a good range of cheevs, including a couple of really tough ones, so casual players can obtain a many cheevos naturally but a perfect game requires mastery.

The most interesting thing about this game is how player-driven the difficulty is. There are two base difficulty levels to choose from, casual and normal, and special mods increase difficulty. Additionally, most challenge areas are optional. This allows the game to be accessible to anyone while making the game enjoyable for a devoted group of hardcore players intent on mastering the game’s hardest challenges and coming up with creative ways to make the game as challenging as possible. In-game modifications include:
* The ability to toggle quest markers

  • Double the chance for blood stones, but increase the damage caused by enemies

  • Double XP from kills, but limit orb drops to creative or bonus kills

  • Enemies explode on dying, increasing difficulty

  • Fast travel can be toggled

  • All tool upgrade mods can be toggled (for example, extended hookshot range, armor composite)

It’s a clever design choice by Image & Form and a great way to allow player-driven management of difficulty. Metroidvanias are inherently fun to play by design, gameplay centers entirely around the design of the player controller, but incredibly steep learning curves make the genre too inaccessible at times. An example is Guacamelee!, which I have written about in the past. Guacamelee! one of the best metroidvanias ever made, but Guacamelee! Gold is so punishingly hard some players (including myself) were unable to progress past a certain point. The problem is remedied in Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition, a deluxe re-release which fine-tunes controls and refines certain problematic jumps. The game is still difficult, the challenge areas punishingly so, but the base game is (mostly) accessible.

I enjoyed this one quite a bit and spent about 12 hours on a leisurely completionist playthrough and got 98% of secrets (missed two cogs somewhere and I cannot be assed to go find them), snagging about 80% of the cheevs. The post-game challenge dungeon proved beyond me. The storyline/writing wasn’t terribly interesting, but the game is fun to play and has great controller support.

This year a lot of games have been put on sale for 10-20% of on Steam on release. I’m not sure how long this has been going on, maybe it always has, but I noticed it recently and it motivated me to buy at least one game early (Fashioning Little Miss). Some players were upset SD2 wasn’t discounted on drop. The developers explained there was no way to fairly discount the game across platforms (it’s also on the Switch) so it wouldn’t be on sale for a while. People on the forums were asking if they could get a discount if they owned previous games, SteamWorld Dig and SteamWorld Heist. Look, $20 is an absolutely fair price for a solid metroidvania, especially for challenge players who are interested in speed runs and the like. It really bugs me that players want to nickel and dime a game that is professionally crafted by several dozen people over one-to-two years. These games don’t develop themselves, all right?

tl;dr They don’t just plant a metroidvania bush and harvest a quality game a few years later. A lot of people spent a lot of time and work building the thing. Buy the thing, or don’t buy the thing, but don’t bitch about the MSRP. The game is priced correctly.