Heroes of Hammerwatch (Review)

Heroes Of Hammerwatch is a 1-4 player action adventure dungeon crawler with rogue-like elements and procedural generation. Developed and published by Crackshell Games.

At the start of your journey you'll pick from one of four starting classes, each with their own abilities and melee or long range fighting styles. After choosing there's some minimum character creation like skin, hair, and outfit colors, after customizing and naming your hero, the game starts and you're sent to the main town hub area. This is where you can use the gold and ore you've collected from your time plundering the dungeons, to purchase upgrades for stats and potions, as well as unlock new characters and buildings.

Entering the mines (first dungeon) you'll find traps, loot, secrets, and rooms littered with enemies (diablo style). Each dungeon is comprised of four floors, the fourth being the boss floor. Each dungeon contains a few enemy types, traps, merchants, chests, and little minecart systems that are used to transport the gold and ore you've collected back to town (you lose everything on you when you die). the minecarts are a cool idea but it's very frustrating when there isn't one present in the current level and you die, losing possibly all progress made.

At it's core Heroes of Hammerwatch is a hack n slash with rogue-like elements, meaning you obviously have to restart every time you die. The way most rogue-likes keep this from getting extremely tedious and boring, is by creating a sense of constant progression, with upgrades and new items being introduced to keep gameplay feeling fresh and each new run different from the last. This game kind of fails to do that, upgrades don't make a huge difference and are fairly costly and even when you have money, you won't always have access to new upgrades as they are locked behind town upgrades that cost ore instead of coin. Ore is much rarer than coin and the town upgrades that they're used for take a little more than they probably should. This stunts progression and gets really grindy and it pretty much stays this way through the entire game.

Your progression in the dungeons will depend heavily on your upgrades and leveled up skills, instead of being based on skill, the game is based mostly on stats. If you haven't been upgrading your attack, you're probably not going to beat the next boss as they are quite spongey. I know that this is how most rogue-likes work but again, most rogue-likes have better progression systems. The game isn't all bad though, for starters the pixel art is great and some of the music is pretty cool, the grind is much more bearable when playing with friends so there's that too, and it's generally enjoyable to play (at least for short periods of time). One thing that does change up the gameplay a bit is the fountain in the middle of town that lets you change some aspects of your next run, making it harder or easier and adding benefits, this was fun to fiddle around with for a while and was useful when I needed a little extra gold.

As far as bugs go, I didn't run into anything major, but I realized that the sprites stutter and lag more when playing with a controller which is a bummer cause it's my preferred way of playing top down dungeon crawlers. I'm sort of disappointed that I didn't like it more than I did but in the end heroes of hammerwatch is just too grindy and I lost interest in completing it, if you like dungeon crawlers or rogue-likes and don't mind some heavy grinding then you might enjoy this more than I did, but if you're not so tolerant to grinding I wouldn't recommend it. Heroes of Hammerwatch is available for $11.99 on Pc/Steam.