After the huge success of SteamWorld Dig on the 3DS - and its later ports to other platforms - Swedish developer Image & Form is back with another installment in the SteamWorld series: SteamWorld Heist. While this game will be a sequel, it will feature a radical departure from the previous entry's gameplay.

In an interview with Nintendo Life, Image & Form's CEO Brjann Sigurgeirsson gave a brief description of what players can expect.

It's a game about space adventure and survival, where you recruit this team of rag-tag robots and explore what's left of a destroyed earth. The idea of the core gameplay is that you board enemy ships and command this crew in a unique variety of turn-based combat - but obviously it's not only about this combat, it's like Dig, it's going to be story driven. There's going to be a start, there are going to be characters with quite a bit more depth hopefully than we got to with the characters of Dig, and there's going to be an end to the game.

So in those respects they are similar, but otherwise the gameplay, as you have seen, is really quite different. Where Dig was a Metroidvania digging platform adventure, Heist is a turn-based combat game set in space featuring steam driven robots. So they're very, very far apart in terms of gameplay.

Sigurgeirsson

SteamWorld Heist is targeting for a 2015 release, and is scheduled for release on the 3DS and Wii U.