One would be forgiven for assuming that Image & Form would capitalize on the success of Steamworld Dig by pushing out a by the numbers sequel. And in fairness to Dig, that wouldn’t have been a bad thing. It’s a great game. However, the canny geniuses over at Image & Form have decided to keep their universe in place and scrap pretty much everything else from the first game. Where as Dig was a sidescrolling exploration and mining game that took place on a 2d plane, Heist is a 2d, sidescrolling turnbased tactical RPG. Taking inspiration from XCOM, Fire Emblem and then throwing a wicked twist into it with slick controls, simplified but by no means simple mechanics, customizable difficulty and Image & Forms by now trademark top notch visual design and humor, this is a game you should grab as soon as possible.

You take control of Piper, captain of a smuggling ship. Shes joined by her pilot Wonky and Seabrass, her shotgun toting sidekick. Other party members can, of course be recruited but I’ll touch on that in a moment. At the beginning of the game, a charming, genuinely funny and well voice acted movie plays out in 1930’s British Public Service Announcement style. Think Fallout here, complete with cheesy voiceover, period perfect music and grainy almost sepia toned imagery. It describes the Scrappers who are moving into moving in on the territory where Piper operates, as well as the Royals army and even hints at some fiendish alien threats. You are then dumped straight into a rescue mission and it’s away you go into the games roughly 12 hour campaign. Oh, by the way, everyone is a robot. And speaks in gibberish. It’s stylish and adorable.

Gameplay is simple, intuitive and fun, but hides plenty of depth. Gone are fiddly AP points. Instead, Steamworld heist has a simple color-coding. You know how far you can move when you stop being able to move your cursor. Run to far, and you can only regain your breath after the sprint. Juggle your movement right and you can move to cover and fire. or fire and move to cover. Or throw a grenade, punch someone with a spiked set of brass knuckles, use a repair kit….theres a lot of diveristy here. Thankfully, Image & Form have made some very smart design decisions. Your menu of combat choices never feels overwhelming. Instead, it feels precisely metered and finely tuned, gradually ramping up the options available to you to keep combat fresh without drowning the player in buttons and icons. As characters level up, they gain access to new abilities that further tweak combat. Seabrass for example gains the ability to deal massive damage to an enemy after he’s already been damaged. Sally on the otherhand gains an ability that allows her to fire an extra shot after she kills an enemy. This allows you to effectively use Seabrass and Sally as a one two sucker punch to devastate enemies.

The environment also plays a big part in Heist’s gameplay. Certain floors can be shot through, most cover is destructible, explosive barrels litter the decks and you have to keep an eye out for turrets and reinforcements that can be deployed after a certain number of turns. This gives the game a way to ramp up the difficulty throughout a level without feeling cheap. And then there are the ricochets. Most weapons can be angled to bounce around a simply ludicrous number of times. This can allow you to pull of insane trick shots to nail that enemy crouching behind a barrel. Some scoped weapons include a laser sight to aid in this process, and thats when you notice that you also have to allow for the breathing of your robotic party members. The enemies themselves take great advantage of this mechanic as well, especially one particularly epic boss.

One of the only nitpicks I have with the otherwise excellent combat has to do with screenspace. Sometimes it can be hard to see enemies, forcing you to use the 3DS’s analog stick to move the camera over, potentially taking your character and their weapon out of the frame. This is a complaint I imagine will be largely addressed on larger screens, but is something to bear in mind on the handheld. I rarely found it to be to much of a problem though.

I’ve mentioned smart design a few times, and it doesn’t end at combat. Image & Form have wisely allowed players to customize the difficulty of the game before each mission. Since the higher difficulty levels can punish failure by relieving you of a portion of your total supply of water, the game’s currency, while lower ones do not, this becomes a great way to get past a tough spot and make some progress. Inventory systems are streamlined and easy to manage and even shopping is a pleasure thanks to the cast of characters that pack the bars dotted around the game’s map. These bars also contain recruitable party members. New members can be recruited once you have enough reputation, represented by stars. There are three stars available in each mission, awarded for clearing the objectives, not having party members die and picking up the Epic Swag in each level. Epic Swag is usually a cool new gun or piece of equipment and is worth grabbing on it’s own, even without the incentive of that extra star. Reputation also grants access to new areas of the map as well as a few difficult missions. Its a nice way to gate progress without being to unfair and the flow it establishes soon becomes familiar.

I haven’t touched much on sound and graphics and both are fantastic. Colors pop, character and ship designs are charming reflecting the combined Steampunk and Wild West sensibilities of the Steamworld universe. The music is good in levels, but the bar music really stands out and I found myself listening to it while writing this review. Your party members and enemies speak in an amusing gibberish, clanks and ricocheting shots are all great. The 3d effect on the 3ds is also rather striking, adding a bit of pop and clarity to the game without being distracting. In short, the presentation of the game is everything I’ve come to expect from Image & Form.

Finally, a few little notes on the game. There is a New Game+ mode which doesn’t do anything overly dramatic, but is a nice edition. And then there are the hats. Many enemies wear hats that you can shoot of of their heads with well placed shots. They don’t actually do anything aside from giving you an extra customization option for your party members. And there are 100 of them. In addition, there were a a few times where I didn’t feel totally connected to the story or world. its not that they aren’t good, its just that the larger galaxy narrative didn’t pull me in like the smaller drama of Steamworld Dig did.

All that being said, Steamworld Heist is a fantastic game. Polished, funny and combining the systems and ideas of great tactics RPGs like XCOM and Fire Emblem  (and others) into a package that has it’s own twists and amazing editions, I can safely recommend picking this one up on your console of choice.

Score: 9/10

Available On: 3DS, *PC/Max/Linux, *PS4, *Wii U, *Xbox One, *Vita

• Due to Image & Form’s small size, Steamworld Heist’s launch will be staggered to ensure they can maintain consistent quality. As of time of writing, not all dates are finalized. Updates to follow.

Chaos Reborn, the wizard-warring strategy game from Julian Gallop (the creator of the original X-COM game) has just received an update that has added a lot as well as a demo having been added for those wanting to try before they buy.

The demo itself is available on Chaos Reborn’s Steam page, where you can pick up the game as well for the price of £14.99. It’s a pretty substantial demo too so you can get a really nice feel for the game before you pay up.

In an update on Steam Gallop said: “It gives players free access to the multiplayer modes and tutorials, but not realms, offline battles or social rank progression. The inventory limit is also restricted to 7 items.”

The update that has come at the same time is update 1.2 which adds a moderator to Realms to make sure that they are playable and work before they get released publicly. Kind of like what Nintendo did for the play made Mario Maker levels to ensure nothing impossible ever want public.

The rest of the update is a list of fixes and tweaks to other game mechanics:

• The maximum number of concurrent asynchronous games has been raised from 20 to 40.
• In the equipping screens the staffs and bodygear have a new display which shows the 3D model and compares stats with the currently equipped item. For staffs you can press a button to see all the spells that match the staff type.
• The new realm moderation system has been implemented. New realms have to be approved by a realm moderator before being released to the public.
• A realm design guide has been added to the realm editor, and the game guide is also accessible from the realm editor.
• Aelfscyne talisman mana cost increased from 35 to 50.
• Battle event log scrolling now works properly (and has a scroll bar).
• Paralysed gooey blobs will no longer attack trapped victims.
• Fixed a bug where a player wasn’t able to change equipment configuration that was used in classic private async game request.
• Players in private matches will now be disconnected for inactivity.
• Fixed a bug that caused the client to break if the server disconnects it during the login animation.
• Fix: talisman target selection, battle log, mega spell activation, select rider button, and select player buttons are now selectable on touch devices.
• Fixed the bug where allied victory against 2 wizards in realms is counted as 2v2 win achievement stat.
• Camera zoom key bindings fixed – no longer mixes up zoom in/ zoom out
• Fixed a bug that didn’t allow you to open equipment pack even if you have enough space in inventory.
• Added check for max inventory items when buying equipment packs.
• Fixed a bug where an encounter result offering allies, if interrupted by battle or exiting to menu, would not show the correct title and display an erroneous OK button.
• Also improved the message where you have to dismiss multiple mercenaries in order to hire multiple allies from an encounter.
• Gold awards are now given for wizard lords defeated in towns or wizard towers.

The dates for Steam’s next two big sales have been leaked to the net, along with some other details regarding sales.

The Autumn Sale will run a full week and will kick off the end of next week on November 25th, while the big Winter Holiday Sale for Christmas will last for two weeks and will launch on December 22nd before it finishes next year on January 4th 2016.

The bigger news though is that it seems that the Flash and Daily Sales will not be returning for these sales, throwing it up into the air how big the discounts on games will actually be this time around.

“In past sale events, we’ve asked for two discounts—a duration discount that runs for the length of the sale, and a feature discount that runs in the event that a game is featured on the front page. This year, to optimize the sale for customers and to allow us to feature and recommend your products in more ways to more customers, we’re asking for just one discount, to run the length of the sale.”

The information, taken from a Steamworks developer group post, says that games will still be featured on the front page of Steam for around 24-48 hours; only the discounts on the games will stay consistent throughout the sale time period.

The waiting around for the big discounts on games that you get from Flash and Daily Sales is one of the defining features of the Steam sales I feel, and also makes me wonder if because they’re being discontinued that the discounts that are first applied will be that bit more than the usual 10-50% off or if the discounts originally applied will not actually be budging. It does mean you no longer have to watch for that game you really want going on sale, but adding it to your Wishlist usually helped with that quite a bit.

We’ll know soon though with the Autumn Sale just around the corner.

After a grueling season of play, the best of the best from both North America and Europe have converged in Atlanta for the Smite Super Regionals. The teams will be competing for their chance to go to the Smite World Championship in January.

Day 1, Tuesday kicked off with matches between the top NA teams with Enemy facing Team Solomid and Cloud9 going up against Cognitive Gaming.

Enemy and TSM were a fairly even match on paper, however Enemy took the series 3-1. At one point, their close teamwork even prompted the announcers to comment that they looked like “the old Team Solomid”. Harsh. With some solid engagements on gold fury and excellent objective secure, Enemy easily moves on to the next round, despite TSM clawing away one win.

Things looked a bit different on the Cloud9/Cognitive side with Cloud9 (the defending world champions) putting their opponents to bed quickly, despite a good back and forth in game 2. Despite their attempt to bring it back, Cognitive still fell with Cloud9 having a massive 40 kills while Cognitive still hovered in the sub-20 range.

That wrapped day 1 of the Super Regionals, with Enemy moving on to face the top seeded EnvyUs and Cloud 9 going on to battle against  number 2 ranked Team Eager. TSM will face Cognitive to determining the winner of the 5th place spot.

Wednesday starts the EU brackets, and it looks to be an interesting set of matches with London Conspiract coming in as the underdogs against Titan, and Paradigm and Dignitas battling it out on the other side.

The Smite Super Regionals will be continuing all week, so if you want to know when and where to catch all the action, check out the full schedule below!

Back at the start of the year one of the many games that have gone through development delays in recent times released itself onto Steam finally. Called Raven’s Cry it was pushed back multiple times to give the developers Reality Pump time to finish it. Unfortunately when it did release, it obviously still wasn’t done. The reviews marked this down as a buggy, historically inaccurate and just plain bad game.

Now Reality Pump are renaming, rejigging and re-releasing the game as what they call the “completed” version. Which kind of makes you wonder why they released it before it was that in the first place.

If you bought the original version, all you need to do is sign this form and you will get a copy of the new version for free provided you can show proof of purchase. Retitled Vendetta: Curse of Raven’s Cry, it apparently features “all-new gameplay mechanics, enemies, weapons, quests and upgrades plus brand new English voice-overs”.

Vendetta: Curse of Raven’s Cry releases on November 20th. Let’s hope it does and the game is completed, so we can put this to bed.