Hammerwatch is a nostalgic dungeon crawler, sort of how Diablo II used to be. But I am reminded more of Gauntlet for the SNES and maybe the N64, which I believe has screwed up my thumbs for life. The main difference is not all classes are ranged. Straight hack-and-slash with simple game mechanics. It has a hint of rogue-like characteristics in the sense that you have limited lives and once you hit 0, it’s game over. It’s much more fun to play in a group, but I also enjoy playing by myself.

One of my friends has been bugging me to play a game with him but I don’t have a lot of time to spend. Long saga stories are out and so are MMOs (although I did try WildStar‘s open beta and enjoy it–too bad it’s not F2P). I’m not too big into PvP, either. We had previously played Orcs Must Die 2 together, although we never finished it. I think we were just a few maps away from the end. So, I saw Hammerwatch on Humble Bundle with a good deal for gift keys and picked it up.

I spent 3+ hours on a Sunday playing this game with my friend. We only got half way through. Another 3-ish hours and we finished the game.

The game doesn’t waste any time with tutorials so it’s a bit of looking at the options or mashing the keyboard to figure out what does what. WASD are your movement keys and arrow keys are your attacks. You can strafe with the spacebar or hold shift to glue yourself in one spot. Aside from figuring out the movements, the other thing to figure out was how to interact with non-enemy NPCs. Again, that was pretty easy – just attack them to open the dialog window.

I tried the thief, ranger, and warlock classes. The thief and ranger were during my solo play and the warlock during my co-op session. It’s much faster to play co-op, especially if there’s at least one ranged attacker.

I found the difficulty curve was not very steep. In the beginning, you’re almost invincible. As you continue, the monsters have different abilities and it’s almost easier to be a ranged class but you are also more squishy. In solo mode, you can engage in a few enemies at a time. In co-op mode, you can do the same, but part of the challenge is trying to convince your friends not to charge into the mob or use an AoE skill. What we ended up doing was setting infinite lives (a crutch) so we could progress a little faster.

There are only three main drops: money, food, and mana gems. There are tons of props against the walls to smash for money. Sometimes you’ll get food or mana gems. Sometimes you’ll get a bomb. Food replenishes your HP, mana gems replenish your MP, and bombs have a tendency to kill the unwary. Money is what you will spend to improve your character.

Rather than deal with drops and weapons and gear with various attribute bonuses, you just spend money at various vendors to increase your HP, MP, weapon power, special ability power, etc. I ran across some drops from certain monsters (a plant monster and a statue that hurls out freezing orbs in a circle) that increase your HP, MP, or weapon damage. There are possibly other similar drops and these are additional ways to improve your character.

The art style is 16-bit sprite-based, which also means the size of the game itself is very small. I believe the download size was ~21MB. I found the sprite animations were also as simplistic as possible without being too obvious, that is, it’s not completely smooth but it’s not clunky either.

The soundtrack has a tendency to get a little repetitive. As the game is divided into four acts, with each act having its own sprite set (some tiles may be borrowed from previous acts), there is one song per act (that I can tell) that plays in an infinite loop. The tracks I’ve heard are pleasant, but I do recall getting annoyed at the soundtrack and wanting to switch over to my own music at one point while we were trying to figure out what we had missed.

Unlike Diablo II, the levels are not randomly generated on each play. This is a good thing because I think each level is much larger than what you’d find in a Diablo II dungeon (ie, not the overworld). There are hidden passages and secrets, which we found by accident. These are not necessary to progressing, but often they contain hordes of money, which are useful for buying your upgrades. The key to this is looking carefully at the walls and floor. Sometimes there are switches that are necessary to progressing that you can easily look over, resulting in running around the floors trying to figure out what you missed.

I enjoyed Hammerwatch. It was one of those games that looked good, but I wasn’t sure if it would turn out to be a real gem. I wouldn’t set high expectations for a simple game, though – it’s not likely to have a very high solo replay value (but possibly a good co-op replay value) especially once you’ve discovered the fastest path through the game. But, if you are in need of something to pass the time and you feel like you want to hack and slash through a dungeon without playing the min-max numbers game, this is the game to play.