[PAX East] Hands-on with SteamWorld Dig 2: More of the (awesome) same

“If it ain’t broke, don’t try and fix it.” We’ve all heard that saying, right? It implies that we stay the course on stuff that works, as major changes could ruin a potentially good idea. Whenever we hear about game sequels, we often believe that they’ll follow the designs of their predecessors to a tee. When Image & Form announced a sequel to SteamWorld Dig, that could have very easily been the case for the excellent game. Thankfully, it’s much more than that.

SteamWorld Dig 2 feels a lot like the original. In fact, the starting premise was to simply make “more” of the game, since that’s what fans have been asking about for years. More gems, more powers, more characters — it’s meant to be more of everything, turning the steamy dial up to 11, but it also needs to be different enough to stand on its own. Thanks to some of the new features and narrative aspects, it seems to achieve that.

This time around it stars Dorothy, the popular shopkeep NPC from the first game, as she looks for Rusty, who’s gone missing. The demo at PAX East throws us right in to the digging, and it looks and feels instantly familiar to anyone who’s played the predecessor. We have to mine right away, digging up, down and everywhere as we collect gems to trade later. The collectionist in me is piqued right away, and I try to grab everything I see.

Early traps and obstacles in the game include walls that open once triggers are tripped, but if we’re too slow then they’ll slam down and block us. Thankfully, we can find our first power-up nearby. The dash power, which has us run, gather speed and blast into a Sonic the Hedgehog-like dash across the screen, lets us move past the slamming barriers and firing arrows that block our path. Double-jumping moves us up along walls, albeit slowly, and water restricts our movement should we get stuck in it.

Once at the top of the mine we face off against the game’s first boss, a sort of electrified robot that fires laser-like missiles at us. His projectiles crush the cubes of dirt around us, so we need to keep moving to stay out of the way. In order to defeat him we wait for his force field barrier to turn off for recharging, jump on top and dig away at his robot brain with our pick axe. He attacks us in a few different waves, but it’s not difficult enough that we aren’t celebrating a victory moments later.

Though it seems like a supersized version of Dig, Dig 2 carries along with it some changes and hints at what the game actually is. It’s much more action-based than the original, as my battle with a boss early on proved. The original was paced slowly because of the nature of “just dig,” but the action element will ratchet up the speed of the game. After picking at the dev team’s brain a bit, we were able to confirm that SteamWorld Dig 2 is both a sequel to Dig 1 and a pseudo-predecessor to SteamWorld Heist, tying the games together. The “2” in the title’s logo is made of futuristic glowing gems, and the boss is way more technologically advanced than what steampunk is. Finally, the powerup chamber where Dorothy receives her boost ability is an early prototype of one of the robots from Heist.

SteamWorld Dig 2 arrives later this year on Nintendo Switch.