In Steam Marines 2 the evil robots have returned and they’ve brought aliens along with them to mess your stuff up!
Steam Marines 2, from Worthless Bums, is the much awaited sequel to 2013’s Steam Marines. The first title was an isometric, pixelated, turn-based game where you controlled a squad of space marines as they cleared out a spaceship of evil robots. Where that first game had very simple graphics which made for a crisp, clean and consistent look, Steam Marines 2 switches this out for a more freeform, 3D environment.
The most obvious difference is the graphics, but I’m not a big fan of the new style — I will try and not dwell on that, and instead focus on the rest of Steam Marines 2.
The UI and general layout are very similar to the first game, with a short list of abilities and tools for each marine available in a nice little toolbar at the bottom. Its functional and easy to read, something many strategy games struggle with.
As in the first Steam Marines, your goal exists loosely around getting all the dang evil robot/aliens off your mother-frakking space ship — taking turns between you and your adversaries, moving your units around the isometric map and using abilities to take down the aliens. Each class has different abilities to help provide options for your missions. These special skills allow you to better attack your foes, more effectively traverse the maps or just have a better awareness of the play area as a whole.
While a sequel taking a different approach to the previous entry is always something to be lauded, in this case, removing the fairly unique graphics (in my opinion the best feature) leaves Space Marines 2 with no signature feature. That just leaves something fairly decent but not overly unique and well, what’s special about that?
Despite all my ripping, Steam Marines 2 is still a fun and decent game, just not one for me. Maybe as it furthers development new features will appear and our opinion will change. It is currently available in alpha form over on itch.io.
