The use of color and the even better use of real-time lighting and illumination from your upgradable lantern give the game greater immersion and even a sense of urgency when your lantern starts to fail leaving you in darkness. Most gamers will find 8-10 very enjoyable hours playing SteamWorld Dig 2.Īt first glance the graphics appear to have that retro pixel-art style, but upon closer inspection you will find an amazing amount of detail and charming sprite-style animations. There is a great sense of progression, as nearly every trip to the surface gets you a useful upgrade or a new item or ability. SteamWorld Dig 2 definitely fits the bill of casual entertainment, as you can work yourself into a Zen-like state chipping your path into the unexplored depths of the earth only to uncover a secret room, upgrade station, or even a lost temple. Early on you must manually retrace your steps to the surface, but soon enough you’ll unlock a series of fast-travel steam pipes that shoot you back to the village. You’ll need to make frequent return trips to the surface where you can sell your loot and purchase new items and upgrade existing ones, or perhaps cash in a rare artifact for a blueprint so you can craft a new item. While you can always jump-climb most any vertical surface it is also quite possible to dig yourself into an impossible situation. There is some embedded strategy within the game as you must find the perfect path to reach certain pockets of gems or avoid a certain monster, or better yet, drop that monster into an underground pool where it will drown. You’ll get to upgrade your gear, allowing you access to new parts of the mine where further adventure and danger awaits. You’ll chip your way through dirt and rock collecting gems, minerals, and rare artifacts while hacking away at the deadly enemies and dodging crazy traps. I said it about the original and I’ll say it again, SteamWorld Dig 2 borrows heavily on the arcade gameplay of the classic coin-op Dig Dug. And while these Metroidvania-style arcade games seldom need a story, SteamWorld Dig 2 manages to throw in a bit of mystery and intrigue as you set forth into the depths to solve a recent surge in seismic activity as well as locate a certain missing miner from the first game. It takes everything that made the original great and makes it even better, not only on the surface with superior visuals and fun music, but also by substantially fleshing out the gameplay to make it more challenging and varied than ever before. When it opened up a bit later with level design and movement abilities it was kind of a pleasant surprise and felt like a clever and insightful directorial move, almost like when you break out of the test chambers in Portal and start traversing the "unstructured" parts of the facility.Īccompanied with the town narrative and art direction that carried me through and had me interested enough for the sequel, which dropped some of the digger-RPG pretense to the benefit of smoother Metroidvania type action.SteamWorld Dig 2 is the perfect example of a great sequel. I do remember the early phases and some later bits in the main mineshafts being a bit of a frustrating push-pull against the puzzle/opportunity of digging-removes-platforms-permanently movement. What I got was as expected to start with. The surge of games a couple years after would do a lot to popularize and solidify the current definition. Although I'm sure I saw it described as a Metroidvania, it was 2013-4 and the tag didn't have quite the same boundaries or expectations attached IMO. Been several years since I last played it, but I think I was largely expecting a Motherload/ Mega Miner type of dig-upgrade-expand action RPG. I think primarily I came in with different expectations. Videos Images Articles Kickstarters Discussions Sales Dev Postsĭesktop/mobile headers/icon made by u/aam2rf ![]() Political discussions are highly unwelcome. (Links to Kickstarters or discounted games on Steam/GOG are okay). This includes trying to sell, showing intentions to sell, or asking for commercial links. Any form of commercial activity is strictly prohibited. We also encourage a general frequency of no more than one post per week. ![]() We encourage giving updates on your projects, but make sure the posts are of some significance. Self promotion is permitted, but be reasonable.Posts should be related to either the parent franchises, other Metroidvania games, or tangentially related games or topics. Submissions must be Metroidvania-related.Image posts and twitter posts temporarily disabled Top 10 Starter Metroidvanias - Check these out if you're new to the genre! The term, popularized by video game critic Jeremy Parish, is a portmanteau of Metroid and Castlevania. Metroidvania is a subgenre of video games focused on guided non-linearity and utility-gated exploration.
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