Originally posted September 17th 2014 on the Seafoam Gaming Forums

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As this (Finally) gets put on my website, Image and Form confirmed SteamWorld Heist, another game in the series. Look forward to it!

Title: SteamWorld Dig

System: Wii U (eShop)

Price: 9.99

Release date: 8/28/2014

The main game/story

The story isn’t the biggest or most important thing in this game, but it still plays a role in the purpose of why you are doing what you need to do in this game. This is a Metroidvania style game, where you play as Rusty, a steambot exploring the depths of the mine in order to help a small mining town grow. However, this young Steambot will soon discover there is more to the underground that it seems…

Graphics

This game has a simple art style, barely resembling a comic book. Considering the fact that you will be in a dark cave most of the time, it actually works and shows off the dark atmosphere quite well.

Music and sound effects:

You won’t be hearing too many different songs in this game, considering how most of the music is made to be like a ambient sound, and it helps very well. The town theme is simple and shows the Wild West theme, while the mine themes fit the mood of being all alone in a strange territory quite well.

Gameplay

When you first start up the game, things can seem a bit slow. Your main weapon takes forever to let you dig, and it seems like a grinding game at first. Luckily after completing the first mission, things take off like a fast, speedy rocket.

You dig for materials, which you then sell off to level up the town, which also gets you money that will allow you to buy upgrades and other items, letting you get materials faster, which starts a cycle that makes the game surprisingly addicting. You also will see occasional puzzle rooms where you must complete a certain objective in order to get a mandatory upgrade to progress the story, but besides that it’s pretty much the same. Usually this hurts a game a lot for me, but SteamWorld Dig does it in a way that makes it very fun up until the end of the game.

You see, after you clear one area of the mine, you go to the next and everything seems a bit more difficult. Rinse and repeat the mining process and you can spend your orbs and money on upgrades, and eventually you’ll be so powerful you can literally blaze through the beginning of the mine in under a few minutes. This idea of progression is downright GENIUS and really helps to make you feel like you improved over the course of the game.

Sadly, despite the fact that the game is excellent and has randomly generated mines, it’s very short. As soon as you fight the single major enemy this game has to offer (Since combat isn’t really that important in this game), you are finished. Nothing else to do besides buy all of the upgrades, or if you are a speedrunner rush through the game to get a better time. While no two games can be quite the same, it still will eventually get boring after a while, which is a big shame since this game is so good. The best example of a “short and sweet” experience.

Conclusion

In the end, SteamWorld Dig is quite a fun game. With a great gameplay style, while also allowing for Off-TV play and a inventory (Though whenever I used the gamepad inventory it seemed to be unresponsive to anything I selected despite everything else on my Wii U gamepad working fine), it’s easy to pick up and play. Sadly at $10 it’s hard to recommend except to fans of speedrunning and also players who don’t mind the idea of a short and sweet experience. If this is on sale however, I strongly encourage you to buy it no matter what kind of gamer you are! I give SteamWorld Dig an 8 out of 10.

Thanks to Image and Form for the review code.