Top down days: Hammerwatch

There is a terrible feeling when I look over my Steam collection.

It isn't the biggest backlog in history or something, but I'm at something like 200 games tried out of 1200 games. That's nice. What isn't nice is realizing I had bought a game I wanted to play, and then forgot to play it for a long time due to it falling into that giant pit of unplayed games. It's an unpleasant abyss.

Hammerwatch is one of those games. I got back in ... It looks like 2014? Yeesh, is that seriously right, that's brutal. Back logs are the most first world problem not involving purse dogs or speculating on ebay sales, but it's still kinda dismal when you flip through the Badge page and realize you've been playing games you're not exactly too impressed with instead of games with Very Positive scores and pretty consistent reviews.

It's also really bad when you go over how many games you've played from six months of the Humble Monthly - which ain't cheap, after six months - and that is seriously at a whooping 1/30 or something. Ok that's worse.

But I did finally manage to play Hammerwatch


 

 Hammerwatch is a top down (or whatever the old term was) dungeon crawler in which you battle against scores of enemies, looting their belongings and searching for secrets, avoiding traps and opening up various hidden chambers. It's a very simple, easy to pick up game with a good sense of motion that encompasses it's entire being from top to bottom. You go and you shoot and/or you fight and you loot, then you search for secrets. Secrets feel gooooood.

Your character is really, decidedly simple. Actually, other than the alt fire ability, the game plays a lot like a top down Doom with no weapon swapping. If you've ever read reviews where people talk about how Doom transitioned from 2d to 2.5d and how it actually "looks" from the outside when played, you'll start to notice this game is not unlike that. Enemies have a melee wind up - you don't take damage on hit - so you dodge and strafe around, working corners, breaking LoS, luring them forward. Anyway you attack, you have a singular potion and you have an alt ability. For the paladin, it's a roll, and for the archer it's a bomb.

You also have access to a "combo" system, though it's a paid upgrade a little bit into the game for reasons that make no sense to me. The combo is killing ten enemies. That is the combination that unlocks a brief powered up state. Hurray. You have only a limited amount of time to chain the combo, and it's sort of interesting how it interacts with the general attrition of the game while feeling surprisingly bad for boss fights or mini-boss scuffles.

Beyond the little bits and baubles, combat is pretty simple. Like I said, it's early FPS simple, so the game is very easy to just sit down with and get to playing. This probably plays well to the strength of being a MP title, but none of my friends are up for playing the game so ... Yeah, I have no idea how the MP is.

 No wait. The game plays like Heretic. Aww yeah, that's the stuff.

Visually Hammerwatch is pleasing, but decidedly retro. The animations are pretty keen and you don't have trouble on the most part discerning if something is hostile or friendly. There's a fair amount of visual variety between different enemies, and it is very easy to tell if something is an upgraded version of something else. Like there's bats, then there's bats lv2 which have glowing red eyes.

It's such a small thing, but somehow you really appreciate it.

I mean basically the game displays huge hordes of enemies swarming in to crush you and looks pretty solid at it. It is retro enough that someone my age finds it a bit surprising there isn't any slowdown, a concept I imagine most people don't even vaguely remember! It looks like it should.

The music in Hammerwatch is ... This is going to sound like a super weird complaint, but it's almost too good. These are some damn catchy tunes, really epic sounding stuff that is kind of above the mood of the game. Hammerwatch is a bit of a sombre affair, what with the endless violence and trawling through vast dungeons. It feels more like it should have some Diablo style tunes, as opposed to this moving epic shit. It's very catchy! I like it.

The sound effects are pretty generic, normal stuff. The game has a bit of an issue that you reveal secret passageways, doors and the like with switches but they don't seem to "come" from the direction the passageway or whatever is. If that makes sense. Basically it opens a passage and you're kinda like "where" when it could clue you in more. In general, the music is so much better than the audio and you notice the difference.

In terms of controls Hammerwatch falls into the usual subset of games where I'm not certain if the issues I have are my relative inexperience with the xbox1 controller, issues with its sticks deadzoning me or the game's inputs. It works better with the d-pad, but it also tends to require so much clicking and holding that it wears on your hands.

So what are the problems with Hammerwatch? Well, for one thing, the game is just incredibly grindy without really engaging well with it. Enemies can maybe, sometimes drop gold... But otherwise have actually next to nothing to do with progressing forward. There's no leveling, as far as I can tell, though some of the larger monsters do have a chance to drop items that improve your stats. I should say you can get upgrades, but there is no XP driven leveling or talents or rewards for massive slaughter or whatever else. They're just sort of there.

I mean, I've read reviews where people go 'Who needs a story?' but you need like something to engage with all that grinding or get away from it. There's no loot system, no leveling and no story, so all the stuff that gives your brain a bit of a rest from endlessly mashing enemies just isn't present. You kill things.

I'm not entirely sure if I like the feeling of "being lost" which the game does a fair bit. It's a weird complaint, to be sure, but sometimes it feels good to wander around and re-center your bearings. On the other hand, the maps are just willy-nilly and don't feel like they're supposed to be anything. So you get lost and there's often no real landmarks. Sometimes there's cool stuff, but often, there isn't.

On the other hand there's sort of this nice element to getting lost in that you start searching rooms with a fine-tooth combo approach and secrets you ran right past suddenly become kinda obvious. So I don't know. I think that element works, but it's hard to say if it's intentional, or just bad design.

Combat can be a bit of a chore at times. Enemies get stuck on objects, or sit on perfect spots - totally by accident - where they can be hard to hit. Enemies hit very hard, comparatively, and as such you really have to approach each individual opponent with caution. This feels great when you're fighting like 25 enemies, it is tense and rewarding. But you get down to one or two, with one of them stuck on a pillar, and you have to carefully expunge them and it slows the pace of the game right down.

I also found the traps in this game like, way, way uncreative and just a chore to deal with. There are arrow traps and various floor traps, and the game often puts them in situations where you can pursue upgrades or the like. You know what? You just turn right around and leave. The arrow traps nearly one shot you, and the other stuff is pretty much a death sentence.

There's one section in level 2 where there's a huge spikey floor trap that rotates between the two on a couple second rotation. The rewards are like, a healing item, a 1 up, the NPC that upgrades combos. Like, why would I risk dying to get a singular 1 up? It was all just trying to figure out what the mapmaker wanted you to do without really having enough margin for error to experiment. The end result is a sense of jarring disconnect as you stare at the screen thinking how you're supposed to get past something, except it'll kill you and the reward isn't worth a life, so yeah let's just go back to mashing our face into monsters. It is really hard to mentally engage with whether or not a given trap is something you're supposed to combat with dexterity, combat with a class choice or turn off elsewhere in the level. And being unable to discern that quickly breaks up the game's flow and is frustrating to no real benefit to the game.

There's a couple points where traps are used well, breaking up rooms or changing the game's pace in a positive way. Those are the ones where enemies get hit by traps, which is hilarious, or you can determine immediately how you're supposed to deal with them. But the giant trap screens with no obvious indication as to their purpose or solution are just irritating.

Anyway, do I like Hammerwatch? Yeah, it's not a bad title to pick up in a bundle, and probably even better MP. I don't love Hammerwatch though. The game just feels like it sacrificed a little too much for simplicity to really quite gel together. I'm not saying you need some massive super talent tree or whatever, but some simple feeling of progression from killing 10k enemies would be a bit nice.

Just a couple small things, like a little more story and flavor in the main campaign, or a simple talent tree that offers little changes - like maybe your bomb could do a little more damage, or have a larger radius, just simple binary choices - would help gel the groove.

Basically, it's a good pick up if you're going to MP it or if you're ok with getting a couple hours of fun before the tedium sets in. But it's not nearly as good as it should be with only a little in the way of improvements. I hope they're making a sequel, because the game wouldn't need much to go from a 75/100 game to a 90/100 game so to speak.