Yeah but I mean the idea of hand-crafted pieces and the having the procedural generation put together those pieces. That's how most procedurally generated games seem to work. True randomness is too chaotic.

@Zero, the countdown is the number of turns until the alarm response goes up to the next level. First is turrets, then enemies spawn, then tougher enemies, and finally commando like super toughs.
My biggest complaint about this game is how hard it is to level the crew members you don't use a lot. That said, this is now my go to game for when I'm not sure what else to play at the moment

Jesus, the queen boss battle is stupidly hard on the experienced difficulty level. If you just try to focus on her, then you get swarmed fast. If you try to clear out other stuff, you make little to no progress and get swarmed eventually anyway. Once again I feel like they just throw too much at you in this game. Let me breathe and try to strategize a bit without throwing new enemies to clear out at every turn.

I'm trying not to give up and lower the difficulty level but it feels like it is that or grind, and I don't want to grind.

@Guillaume Searching for help on how to beat that thing I'm stuck on and stumbled upon this comment from the lead artist of the game that addresses what you noticed. Apparently it was very intentional.

jakobwahlberg 43 points 1 month ago*
Im glad you asked. We wanted a 50/50 gender ratio in the game (for all characters) without falling into stereotypes. In many games (and other media) the guys represent the large diversity in personality traits where as females are often reduced to the weak traits. The Smurfs are like the perfect example of this. You have the wise smurf, the strong one etc and then theres a single female smurfs who represent all the weak traits. That is an old example and nowadays we have all these strong women protagonist, which is good. They are all still very beautiful looking tho. Not eveyone is beautiful. None of our characters are classic beauties, they are just robots that are assembled the way they are. And honestly why should robots even have a gender to begin with, it doesn't make very much sense when you think about it.

Cool! Yeah, it struck me as a conscious decision for sure. Good on them!

Finally finished the game. There were a few times I was tempted to lower the difficulty but I stuck with it.

Overall I'd say a few small things kept it from being one of my favorite turn-based strategy games, but I still liked it a fair amount.

Zero said:

a few small things kept it from being one of my favorite turn-based strategy games

Care to elaborate?

Well, although I can't imagine it working for a game like this, I just tend to prefer larger scale strategy games... having at max 4 characters at once feels limited. I also felt kind of stuck using the same characters after awhile because the effort it would have taken to level up other ones seemed not worth it. I also didn't really like the sort of constant countdown in most stages, made me feel rushed a lot. And though we already talked about this, I don't really like procedurally generated stages... made them feel repetitive and like there wasn't really much new to discover in the stages themselves.

None of this kept it from being one of the best indie games on the 3DS mind you, but it kept the game from ascending to the heights of my favorite turn-based strategy games.

I wrapped this up at the weekend. I had blasted through 95% of it since launch but just drifted into something else without ever finishing. Had no idea how close I was. But yip; brilliant game, smooth to play & great characters. Image & Form are such confident, accomplished devs.

If there is a sequel I hope they add a bit more variety. Different environments, hazards or some more technical boss fights would have taken this to a higher plane.

DLC coming this week. Not sure how long it is / how much it costs.

"The Outsider" is launching April 28 as DLC for SteamWorld Heist! Full details early next week. Here's a sneak peek: pic.twitter.com/Nt5venshSA

— Image & Form @ PAX (@ImageForm) April 22, 2016

@Zero

Hmm, i'm certainly intrigued.

@Zero

The only thing they've said to me is that it won't break the bank Whatever that means. But this also comes with a free update that adds some other content, apparently stuff people have asked for. We'll see but I'm excited for this!

News about it is under embargo till Thursday but I can say that I will aim to give it a 'reviewer-style' look when it releases since I had written the Negative World review.

Knowing the Image and Form crew, I'm sure there will be a lot of thought into this. I wish they had done some kind of Steamworld Dig DLC honestly. I want more of that game so hard.

So did anyone pick up "The Outsider" DLC? I got it and while it's fun, it's sort of weird how it's handled. I think I would've preferred it to have extra missions at the end of the game rather than have them scattered throughout the main game. You could always pick up a end-game save file and find them of course but it takes away the challenge as you can just breeze through them since the difficulty is in line with what area they're in. Thankfully Heist is excellent so replaying it on Elite difficulty has been a bunch of fun all over again. Leveling up the newly added character and switching up my crew also keeps things fresh from my previous run. Oh and of course hats. New hats! And even new items to collect from what I see so even without the DLC, there seems to be new stuff for players to find. Can't wait to see how it ends as the backstory with "The Outsider" seems rather interesting.

@VofEscaflowne

I picked it up too. Beat it rather quickly. It was great to have this added character and story to enjoy but it feels a bit short and as I went into this from an 'existing file' standpoint, I had to simply go looking for the new stuff. It wasn't really clear where to find all the new stuff.

It's been very fun jumping back into Heist but maybe I would have been better off starting a new file.

I won't go into the story of Fen but I still would enjoy some more there. Not sure there would be. Alas, five bucks… not bad in the end but maybe just a few more missions would have made it feel a bit more thorough.

@DrFinkelstein

You should've done new game +! It's fun to start with all hats and collect some new ones. The ones they added with the DLC are quite surprising I must say. Never saw these coming and they just put a huge smile on my face.

@VofEscaflowne

I did. Well, I used the file from my new game + for it. I've beaten it on two difficulties and with the DLC I just opened my existing NG+ file.

I found a bunch of hats but I haven't double checked every shop to see if I missed any.

I just completed a play-through on PS4 and this time added in the DLC, the DLC is a great value it adds a lot to the game IMO. Fen is awesome.