Steamworld Dig 2 release date unearthed
Hot diggity
Colourful shovel-em-up SteamWorld Dig: A Fistful of Dirt is getting a sequel, didn’t you know (you did) and the release date is now September 21, we’ve been told. But, oh no, that’s for the Nintendo Switch. SteamWorld Dig 2 [official site] will come out on Steam on the slightly vague “a few days later”. No worries, that’s still mere weeks from this particular arbitrary fraction of our temporal reality we’re calling “Monday”. Here’s a wee trailer showing off some of the pickaxing, grappling-hooking and monster-bashing.
You play as a new dig-bot, searching for the missing protagonist of the last game, Rusty. I got to play a teeny bit of it on a laptop at Gamescom. The controls were as smooth as freshly pooped silk and I liked climbing up them walls and digging for jewels. But having missed the original I couldn’t directly tell what was different. The biggest complaint from players, according to Brjánn Sigurgeirsson, CEO of Image & Form, was that there just wasn’t enough of it. So they’ve aimed to make this one longer and introduced more characters and shopkeepers at whom to throw one’s gems. They’ve also put aside the procedural generation of the original and designed the layers of earth beneath your feet in a more hands-on way, I’m told.
A dirt-covered sequel is good news for the likes of John ‘Loves Muck’ Walker, who left the original with a very happy face. He described it as “Spelunky for people who don’t like restarting all the time”. It's part of the same Steamyverse as SteamWorld Heist, the turn-based space pirate romp with clever use of real-time aiming.