henke on 10/8/2024 at 18:26

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Picked up the new game today, for the Switch. Will post impressions once I've played a bit. :)

henke on 22/8/2024 at 06:42

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Alright, been playing SWH2 for almost 2 weeks now so I guess I better post some thoughts.

I don't like it as much as the first one. The mechanics of the turn based combat are as good as in the original, but some of the level elements are more annoying. Especially in the second area of the game, which is set up in the arctic, levels are littered with freezing floor tiles which chill your bots, making their aim worse, or even freezing them solid. And in place of cover, there's big chunks of ice everywhere, which shatters when shot, freeing frozen Rattlers within. These guys are light melee units. Easy to kill, but levels soon get so cluttered with them that you have to spend a lot of time warding them off rather than going for the real threats. Enemy wizards will also place down totems which will either spawn in more Rattlers or deal all your units a bit of damage each turn until they're destroyed. Very annoying.

Your units' upgrade paths have also been made... more complicated. Your guys now have different jobs depending on which weapon they have equipped, and each job comes with its own upgrade-path. Once a job has been leveled up a bit, they can switch job/weapon and keep some of the unlocked abilities from their previous job. I'm finding it harder to plan ahead with this system compared to the easier system of SWH1 and it feels a bit messy and chaotic.

In between heists you explore the world map in your boat/submarine thingy and engage in some light real-time naval combat. The shooting is automatic while you focus on positioning and dodging attacks. It's a kinda Pirates/Vampire Survivors thingy that's pretty light and breezy compared to the heists. It's alright.

The story is nothing to write home about.

I dunno. Playing this I'm mostly reminded of Frozen Synapse 2. The original was pretty much perfect, but for the sequel they expanded it and made it a lot more complex (because they had to do SOMETHING, right?) and just kinda messed it up. I'm still gonna finish this, but I'm not having a great time.