INTRO:
There are game-makers who are very fond of old classics such as Gauntlet and Tower of Druaga. They are so fond of them, that they would make their own video game, albeit with elements which they loved in those games and little of anything else which is original. Jochum Skoglund and Niklas Myrberg are such people, and their game is Hammerwatch.
PREMISE:
Hammerwatch does not do much to introduce the player to its story. Instead, the player has to look elsewhere to figure out the story.
However, the story does appear to follow typical fantasy adventure tropes. The player is part of a group of adventurers, out to carve their way through dungeons full of danger, loot treasures and purchase new powers from weird merchants who somehow sell such things instead of actual products.
If there is any story, it is just an excuse to have intrepid (and fool-hardy) adventurers cutting a swath through hordes of monsters and/or dying horrible deaths, or to make references to the classic video games which inspired Hammerwatch.
UNEVENTFUL MORE THAN HALF-YEAR SINCE DEBUT:
Firstly, it has to be said here that Hammerwatch had given the impression that it is yet another one-off, fire-and-forget garage game, e.g. it is released as soon as its makers think that it is finished and does not grow in any way afterwards.
Indeed, there was more than a half-year gap between its debut and the first (free) major content update. Version 1.1, which happened within this period, was mainly bug-fixes. Balance issues were not addressed, or at least not documented well within this period.
As fun as it was, Hammerwatch had seemed like yet another indie game left to languish from neglect – until the second quarter of 2014.
POST-GOOD-VALUE-SALES UPDATES:
That state of idleness changed after the game was finally put up on discounted and pay-as-you-like offers. Starting from April 2014, Hammerwatch would receive major updates every few months, starting with additional character classes and re-balancing of its existing content.
As of this time of writing, Hammerwatch has obtained an additional campaign module, which is the most significant update as of yet.
(Note: Players who have purchased the non-Steam versions of the game may want to check the state of their download source. The game does not “phone home” to check for updates – which is perhaps for the better.)
GAMEPLAY – IN GENERAL:
The player takes control of one of several adventurers, selected from six classes (as of this time of writing). Then, he/she has to have this adventurer romping through dungeons full of monsters, loot and traps while keeping him/her alive.
(The genders of the adventurers are not conclusively clear, despite some pronouns which are used in the text seen in the game. Their genders are not important in any way though.)
This is easier said than done. Even in multiplayer, the adventurers are greatly outnumbered. The player must learn to utilize the abilities of his/her chosen adventurer efficiently, as well as exploiting the relative stupidity of the monsters to even the odds and learning to avoid the other hazards in the dungeons.
Failure results in death of the adventurer, which in turn reduces the pool of “extra lives” for the adventurer(s). When this pool dries, it is game-over.
CONTROLS:
Firstly, it has to be said that although the game was designed for the computer platform first, it has no support for mouse control whatsoever. It does not make use of analog-sticks for aiming either.
This can be irksome to players who have played dungeon-romping games with twin-stick controllers or even the mouse for free-aiming and strafing.
Instead, the player character can only aim in one of the eight cardinal directions. Apologists can argue that this is old-school ‘goodness’. However, if one considers that enemies in the game are not restricted in such a manner, this is a major design gap.
A similar complaint can be made about movement too. Player characters can only move in the eight cardinal directions, whereas enemies are not restricted in such a manner either.
PROGRESS SAVES:
Starting a playthrough means picking one of the modules which the player has in Hammerwatch’s install directory. However, the player only gets to preserve his/her progress in a playthrough in just one save-game file. In the case of multiplayer, only the host gets to record his/her playthrough; other players do not.
Considering that campaigns can be very long and there are indeed opportunities which can be permanently missed, having only a single save-slot is not convenient.
LIVES & GAME-OVER:
Although the player can continue his/her progress in a play-through by reloading a saved game, he/she will lose all that progress if he/she runs out of “lives” for his/her character.
There is a pool of “extra lives” which all player characters in a session share, even in multiplayer. If this pool dries up, any player character which dies does so permanently. If all player characters lose this way, the playthrough is forfeit.
This can seem a nasty punishment, but to old-school players, this is a fitting one. After all, the player might well deserve this for having squandered all those extra lives.
This sentiment is reinforced if one considers that additional extra lives can be obtained by collecting ankhs. In other words, there are chances to replenish the pool of extra lives, and few excuses for incompetence.
HEALTH:
As to be expected of “adventurers” in fantastical games, they are made of stern stuff, e.g. they do not die from a single hit (though they would if a modifier is enabled, but this is digressing).
Their ability to take hits is represented by their pools of hitpoints. Different classes have different starting health. They also have different magnitudes of health upgrades. For example, the Wizard is the squishiest of the lot. The Warlock starts with the most hitpoints, but is eventually out-classed by the Paladin in sheer volume of hitpoints.
Obviously, running out of hitpoints results in death. However, being intrepid “heroes” and typical video game protagonists, the adventurers do not become slower and weaker as they reach death’s door.
Other than an exclamation mark which gets more distressingly red as they take more damage, there is no difference in their performance and no other consequences to be had. There is no other gameplay feature which takes advantage of the health system either.
Anyway, to regain health, the adventurers have to eat fruits and meat which are somehow lying around the dungeons. This is, of course, homage to Gauntlet and other old games which had food items lying around in all sorts of unlikely and unhygienic places.
There are two other ways to heal, but these are not available until the player has developed the adventurer to have the abilities to perform these (and even then, some classes do healing better than the others).
However, these methods are a lot more reliable and entertaining. They will be described later, together with the classes.
VIEW OF THE ACTION:
The player views the game through a top-down view with a slightly oblique angle. This means that the player can see any threat around the player character, but only up to a certain distance.
There are indeed enemies which can attack the player character outside of the player’s view. These enemies are unpleasant to deal with, but at least the game seems to pose them as “advanced” enemies which appear much later into a playthrough. By then, the player would be experienced enough to know how to deal with them (namely by using cover until they come within sight).
Interestingly, the levels in the original campaign are designed such that walls separate the player character from enemies which the player has yet to encounter. This tells the player about what’s ahead, though not much beyond how these enemies look like.
However, this design policy is tossed out for the Temple of the Sun campaign. This is likely because that campaign is intended for experienced players, but there is no clear indication of this in-game, which is to the detriment of unsuspecting new players.
Anyway, the player has no control over the zoom level of the camera. The game could have been easier to play if there was such an option.
SWITCHES:
Including switches as a surmountable barrier to progress is a very common and thus very typical design in games which have the player romping through non-linear but not open-ended levels. For better or worse (worse in the eyes of jaded players), Hammerwatch will not diverge from this design trope.
There are two types of switches in the game: a floor-based version and one mounted on walls. The floor-based ones are a lot bigger and obvious than the latter, which are often used to hide the way to secrets.
The floor-based ones are also easier to figure out. They are often bordered with colour-based indicators, which help the player associate them with what they control. The wall-based ones, which are usually not colour-coded, are vague with what they do, especially if they are related to secrets. The most which the player would get from these switches are some lines of text, which are also vague.
If there is an issue with switches, it is that the player cannot reset them; they are one-way toggles. This is not exactly an issue throughout the game, but there is one segment in the original campaign when it rears its ugly head. (On the other hand, the player is warned by an NPC against using the associated switch in this scenario.)
Switches are also not marked on the auto-map. However, since they are only one-way, this omission from the auto-map is not a big issue; the player is usually better off activating any switch which he/she comes across, unless warned otherwise.
BOSS SWITCHES:
If having the player’s progress artificially delayed by switches is not enough, there are also switches to reach the bosses of the original campaign.
These are even more obvious than floor-based switches, and unlike regular switches, are actually marked on the map. Working with them is usually a tedious but short affair, e.g. the player character has to step over four switches instead of just one, for whatever reason.
There could be an unimplemented co-op feature here, e.g. the need for four player characters to stand on the switches. If this was the case, then it is fortunate that such a trite feature had not been implemented.
KEYS & LOCKED “DOORS”:
Another design trope which Hammerwatch resorts to is a system of locked doors and the keys to them. This system is typically used to slow down the player’s progress, though some are used for optional endeavours.
For no reason other than ages-old design traditions, there are material-coded keys and doors. Any doors of the same material can be used to unlock doors of the same material. For example, all silver keys can be used to unlock silver doors.
Experienced players would be able to recognize this system the moment they see it, but Hammerwatch, perhaps deliberately, thwarts this with a visual peculiarity. This peculiarity comes from the looks of the so-called “doors”.
They look more like walls than doors. This could throw off many new players until they somehow make the association between the keys and these doors (usually through their colour, or failing that, a third-party guide). Perhaps the annoying buzz which plays whenever the player character bumps into them without the appropriate keys would help.
Anyway, after the player realizes this, the player would notice that they do not open like doors either. They simply disappear when the player character bumps into them with the appropriate keys. This can appear underwhelming.
In the original campaign, golden keys are required to progress in any playthrough. The function of silver keys is similar, but they may be used to stall the player’s access to vendors at times. The bronze keys are usually used for optional endeavors, such as unlocking barriers to rooms full of coins.
This is not told to the player, but an observant one would be able to notice this nuance.
Fortunately, the Temple of the Sun does not have too many keys and locked doors. However, it “compensates” with other busywork, which will be described later.
TRAPS & HAZARDS:
Enemies are not the only dangers which the player would face. There are traps and other environmental hazards too. In fact, they may be even more dangerous, because they are always there and generally cannot be disabled. They also tend to do more damage than enemies do.
Most of these traps and hazards would be par for the course; they would not be surprising jaded players.
The more mundane ones include wall-mounted arrow traps, which shoot arrows periodically.
The more troublesome ones happen to be a lot less avoidable as well as being deadlier. For example, there are powerful spear-chucking turrets with floor-based triggers which can run across uncomfortably long distances. A less frustrating but no less dangerous example is the spike trap, which immediately kills almost anything which moves on top of it.
More often than not, the player has no choice but to navigate through these traps in order to progress. There are some levels which have switches that allow the player to disable some traps, but these are few in between. Traps in optional areas tend to be even denser.
Usually, traps are easily noticeable. In the Castle Hammerwatch campaign, the game also introduces traps by placing some enemies very near them when the player encounters the traps for the first time. The enemies would blindly charge at the player, thus killing themselves. Observant players should be able to realize the hazards which they face.
Other traps usually resort to ominous-looking visual designs. Woe to the player who is curious enough to consider checking them out with his/her player character instead of luring enemies into them.
PROBLEMS WITH TRAPS:
The main problem with traps in Hammerwatch is the reliance on ever-increasing density of traps as a way to increase the challenge of the later levels in either campaign. This problem is particularly severe in the original campaign that is Castle Hammerwatch.
For example, in Castle Hammerwatch’s later floors, the game resorts to the use of many overlapping spear turrets, as well as placing keys on the floor-based triggers for these traps. They can be incredibly unpleasant to deal with.
The Temple of the Sun campaign introduces even more ways to die at the metaphorical hands of uncaring edifices. Crushing traps and intensified solar beams are some of the new hazards which the player has to face and work around.
The Temple of the Sun’s trap density is more manageable, but it resorts to a lot more area-denial traps and instant-death traps, more so than Castle Hammerwatch. The aforementioned solar beams are particularly troublesome, especially considering that triggering them is mandatory for progress in the campaign.
NUANCES WITH TRAPS:
At the very least, traps may offer some entertainment as the player learns about how to work around them. Different traps offer different levels of entertainment, however.
The more boring and tedious ones are traps which occur along the floor. These include the near instant-death spike traps, which trigger periodically. These require some patience to deal with, yet patience is not exactly the kind of personality quirk which one would find in players who want to play Hammerwatch.
Also, there is of course the appeal of luring enemies into traps, which hurt them as much as they hurt the player characters.
CONTAINERS:
The loot to be found in dungeons does not always occur as loose items. Loot is often secreted away in containers which are lying around. These containers take the form of crates, pots and, in the case of the Temple of the Sun campaign, foliage.
They may look different as the locales change, but just like the locales are functionally similar to each other, these containers are functionally similar to each other too. The player breaks them to release stuff, usually bits of coin. Occasionally, they may release apples.
If the player is unlucky, they release something nasty instead, such as bombs which will explode if the player is not bright enough to get out of the way. In the case of the Temple of the Sun campaign, there are more than just bombs which might come out of containers.
The only containers guaranteed to release good things are chests. They almost always drop valuables, such as jewels (which are worth more than coins) or something more immediately useful, such as statistic upgrades. Chests are far and few in between though.
WEALTH:
Speaking of coins and jewels, looting them will be what the player does for a significant portion of any playthrough.
All of this wealth is converted into points which in turn go into a counter. The player will be using this counter to track the currency which the player would spend on purchases from vendors.
Before version 1.3, there was a character class – the Thief – who has skills which consume currency when used. This proved to be too controversial for players who are used to the skills of other classes. Yet, this drawback was also what made the Thief play very differently from the rest.
Unfortunately, instead of seeing this issue as a fine-tuning challenge, the developer took out this drawback entirely.
Still, the developer has used the currency system to subtly tweak the challenge of the later levels in the campaigns.
In these later levels, the player will have to decide whether to spend currency on upgrades or consumables (to compensate for the scarcity of food items).
(Of course, skilled players would not have to resort to the latter.)
VENDORS:
All the shiny things which the player collects would eventually be spent at the vendors.
In both of the campaigns available for players at this time of writing, vendors are individuals who (somehow) sell upgrades to the statistics of player characters or even additional abilities.
The narrative ramifications of these aside (and they should not be taken seriously anyway), vendors are the main way to power up a player’s character with. Moreover, consequently, loot is practically the “experience points” which the player needs, if one is to use RPG parlance as an analogy.
The vendors’ diversity of offers are delineated by their ranks, which are depicted by the numbers above their sprites. Higher ranks means that they offer more options, which include the subsequent upgrades ahead of previous similar upgrades.
The locations of the vendors are a lot more sensible in the Temple of the Sun campaign than they are in the original campaign. They are concentrated in a hub-like area, not unlike the settlements seen in hack-‘n’-slash games.
However, this convenience comes with a setback. In the second campaign, the vendors start at very low ranks, even rank “zero” (at which they offer nothing at all). It will not be long before the players exhaust their offers.
The player has to do some additional busywork to increase their ranks. In this campaign, the player has to locate pieces of special ore to be chucked into the bowls next to the vendors whom they want to upgrade. These ore pieces are often behind nasty trap-filled areas too.
Furthermore, there are more vendor ranks than there are ore pieces in the entire campaign. Therefore, the player will have to choose carefully which vendors to give them to. This is in addition to the possibility that the player may not have enough gold to purchase every upgrade.
VENDOR COINS:
In either campaign, the vendors start their prices at specific levels, usually multiples of hundreds. They may seem prohibitive, but the prices can be somehow altered by collecting gigantic floating objects called “Vendor Coins”.
The equation to calculate the actual discount percentage offered from the number of vendor coins obtained is not clear, however. Generally though, the player wants as many vendor coins as possible. After all, any savings can eventually lead to one or more additional options purchased at the very end of a playthrough.
CHECKPOINTS:
Throughout almost every level in the two campaigns, there are checkpoints which the player can use to record his/her progress. In fact, without touching a checkpoint after starting a playthrough in either campaign, the player won’t have the game creating a save-game file for him/her.
(Consequently, there is no way to record one’s progress in the other game modes; more on these later.)
Checkpoints are often placed far apart from each other, meaning that the player will always face the risk that an unexpected game crash would wipe all the progress which the player has made since the last checkpoint. However, the game is generally stable enough that this should not be an issue.
What is an issue though, albeit a minor one, is that the game falters a bit when the player activates a checkpoint. This faltering is not a problem, unless enemies are nearby (which is usually due to the player’s fault, because there are few enemies which spawn near checkpoints).
MOVING BETWEEN FLOORS:
Moving between floors also counts as activating checkpoints. The game does inform the player about this, fortunately.
There is also a problem with this feature, however; it is encountered in multiplayer.
All player characters must be in the same floor. If one player wants to go to another, all of the players must decide to do so. If one player reaches a floor exit first, he/she has to wait for the others, which can be boring.
The player should not expect player characters to be able to clear out different floors simultaneously.
UPGRADE SYSTEM:
As mentioned earlier, the player will be spending gold to purchase character upgrades from the vendors.
Every class has its own set of upgrades. Even if they appear to share similar ones, such as health or mana pool upgrades, the efficacies of these are different from class to class. For example, the health pool upgrade is most effective to the Paladin, as to be expected of a character which ascribes to the “tank & spank” archetype.
Then there are the upgrades for the different classes’ different abilities. For each class, one of his/her abilities is already available for use by default; the others have to be enabled via purchases.
Interestingly, the game has some accommodations to help joining players keep up in multiplayer, though these measures are not fully comprehensive.
When a player joins an ongoing multiplayer session, the host’s computer will create a log for that player. This log possibly contains details like the player’s IP address and chosen name. If so, this is then associated with the player’s choice of class. The log also keeps a record of the upgrades which the player has purchased for that class during that session.
If the player leaves that session and joins the same session later with the same username and class, he/she would regain the character which he/she had used, complete with the upgrades which had been purchased.
In addition, the player is given money equivalent to the amounts which the other players have collected, if the player is joining the session for the first time. Therefore, even though the player starts with a rookie character, he/she can purchase upgrades to get his/her character up to snuff.
If the player had rejoined the session instead, his/her money counter is reset to be on par with the other players’, with the money which has been spent on upgrades already accounted for.
Unfortunately, the conveniences end here. Vendors may not be anywhere nearby in the original campaign when the player joins the session. In the case of the second campaign, the player has to wait for the entire party to decide to leave for the town.
CONSUMABLES:
One of the vendors does not sell upgrades, but instead sell expendable items. One of these items include extra lives, which automatically go into the player’s pool of lives.
The other consumables are potions. Although there are several types of potions, each player character can only carry one of any type.
This is a limitation which reduces the utility of some potions. Generally, wise and skilled players are likely to carry the potion which grants immediate refills of health and mana. To them, this potion is practically a second chance.
The other potions do have potent effects, such as a potion which grants invulnerability. However, they have very short durations, making them poor for anything else other than something to give the player an edge at the start of a fight.
Perhaps these other potions could have had greater utility if the player had been given the convenience of carrying multiple potions.
CLASSES:
Perhaps the greatest appeal of playing Hammerwatch is playing as one of the player character classes. Looking like super-deformed characters rendered as pixel-art sprites, they are a lot feistier than they look – and they can die rather awful albeit pixelated deaths.
Anyway, there are six classes at this time of writing. Two of them were added post-launch, which would please customers who are looking for post-purchase value.
Most of them conform to fantastical adventurer archetypes, though not to an extent that they would seem typical and boring.
RANGER:
The Ranger is, however, the most typical and boring. The Ranger, as his/her name suggests, is a character with long-ranged attacks. He/She has more problems dealing with enemies which are too close than the others would, but he/she does have abilities which allow him/her to slip away while leaving nasty surprises for enemies.
Yet, despite being typical, the Ranger is the most suitable class for new players – something which the game will point out, conveniently.
PALADIN:
The Paladin would seem like the obligatory melee-oriented brute typical to such games. However (or rather, furthermore), he/she has a trio of abilities which make him/her very capable at “tanking” and “spanking”.
One of these is not too useful; it is an area-effect healing power which is not very efficient, even after several efficiency upgrades. Still, it is healing which can be easily performed, especially when compared to the Priest’s (more on him later).
The other two are his/her sword and shield arcs. Even though he/she is a melee specialist, a single-sword stroke from him/her can hit multiple enemies at once.
Similarly, his/her shield has an arc of effectiveness; most ranged attacks which hit this arc is simply ignored.
However, the player will need to learn which ranged attacks can be blocked. Learning about this the hard way is unpleasant.
WIZARD:
The wizard is the metaphorical glass cannon of the six. Even after upgrading his/her health pool to maximum, he/she still dies all too easily under assault.
Even worse, all of the Wizard’s abilities require him/her to be uncomfortably close to enemies. Contrary to typical Wizards in other games, Hammerwatch’s Wizard will not have the comfort of range.
Therefore, he/she can seem difficult to use for players who are more used to those other Wizards. To other players though, the Wizard might seem like an interesting challenge.
This opinion is not all apologetic. The Wizard may not have the advantage of range, but of all the classes, his/her damage output is consistently the highest throughout any playthrough. Barring incompetence on the part of the player, the Wizard is likely to score the most damage in a multiplayer session.
WARLOCK:
The Warlock is perhaps the oddest one of the lot, because he/she is a hybrid of the assassin, warrior and wizard archetypes seen in other games. The Warlock has a nasty dagger which poisons anyone he/she hits. In addition, his/her spells are devastating, though they require more finesse to use than those which the Wizard has.
This makes the Warlock quite a challenging character to use: the player must direct spells to where they can do the most damage in addition to positioning the Warlock, and must know how to use the Warlock’s default attack to damage enemies immediately and over time.
(Prior to version 1.3, there was a feature which allowed the Warlock to destroy incoming projectiles. This made the Paladin a bit redundant. This feature has since been removed, thus reaffirming the Paladin’s role as a shield for the team in multiplayer sessions.)
THIEF:
As mentioned earlier, the Thief previously consumed money through the use of his/her skills; this is compensated by his/her ability to squeeze more money out of enemies. However, with the removal of the money costs, the Thief would get a major advantage in single-player. The Thief also becomes a class which is difficult to pass over in multiplayer sessions.
That balance issue aside, the Thief is a quick close-combat-oriented character. He/She has some abilities to get away, as well as a surprisingly long-ranged ability which can ruin small groups of spread-out enemies – perfect for covering the rear of the team when it charges into a room (as multiplayer participants are wont to do).
PRIEST:
Hammerwatch’s Priest is not entirely the typical Priest archetype seen in so many other games.
The Priest can heal other characters, but not through a convenient healing spell which immediately hits the intended targets. Instead, the Priest has to direct a holy beam at allies to heal them.
However, there is a catch about this versatility: in multiplayer, team-mates can get in the way of the beam when the player is trying to destroy enemies with it. If they are in need of healing, then the beam is not wasted. However, if they are not, they are being a nuisance.
On the other hand, the Priest can also move while firing his Holy Beam, so avoiding wastage of the beam is within the control of the player (assuming that he/she can get used to the limitation of aiming, as mentioned earlier).
Also, the Priest has access to crowd-control abilities, such as an area-effect field which drains health from enemies and give it to player characters.
The Priest also has a mana shield, thus allowing his mana bar to act as a second hitpoint meter. However, this also means that getting damaged reduces his mana reserves; this is not exactly desirable.
At this time of writing, the Priest is also the only character class which can move while making his default attacks (provided that he has purchased the associated upgrades). This is in contrast with the other characters. However, in return, he lacks upgrades which directly improve the secondary properties of his default attack.
ENEMIES – IN GENERAL:
All enemies which the player would face are stupid, it has to be said first. There will not be any cunning enemies who know how to adapt to the player’s tactics and counter them. Of course, this is to be expected of a game which is inspired by Gauntlet and Tower of Druaga.
Instead, the enemies in the game home in on the player character’s location and simply use their attacks in an attempt to kill him/her.
It has been mentioned earlier that enemies are not restricted to movement or aiming in the eight cardinal directions. This is mainly because the movement scripts of enemies are dependent on the current locations of the adventurers relative to them.
In other words, if the adventurers are situated at any distance at any angle to them in the open, they aim and move along the straight line between them.
This means that the player must not have his/her adventurer staying still at all. Indeed, an adventurer who is stuck in place when fighting enemies is pretty much doomed.
In the case of enemies with multiple kinds of attacks, such as bosses and mini-bosses, they either randomly pick among their attacks or cycle through them, with little care to how effective they are. Given their carelessness, the observant player would not take long to figure out the massive gaps in their tactics.
The only true advantage which enemies have is their numerical superiority. In just about any combat encounter, enemies at least outnumber the player two to one.
Even so, a patient player can mitigate this advantage by exploiting their aggro ranges. He/She can lure enemies over piece-meal by edging towards mobs and turning back after attracting the attention of the individuals at the fringes of the mobs.
However, the new player might learn the hard way that entire mobs can be roused if the player somehow hit their fringe members with long-range attacks. This can happen if the player took the Nova combo upgrade, or more often than not, one of the Ranger’s stray arrows going somewhere it should not be going.
These mobs may come up to the player when the player least wants them to, thus making these long-ranged attacks rather double-edged.
SPAWN GENERATORS:
Some regular enemies benefit from the presence of spawn generators, which continuously spawn reinforcements into the level.
These generators usually become active when player characters are close by, though their ranges of detection vary a lot. For example, the tree stumps which spawn bats have the longest range of detection, whereas maggot mini-queens have the shortest.
Theoretically, the player could attempt to farm enemies for coin drops by exploiting their infinite reserves, but this is not a cost-efficient way to spend time playing the game with.
SPIKE MONSTERS:
At launch, one of the most troublesome enemies in the game is an immobile monster which sends spikes up the asses of player characters when they get in range. This enemy has been re-designed, not to become weaker, but rather has its presence announced by holes in the ground. These holes also delineate how far it can reach.
For better or worse, there is a variant of the spike monster in the Temple of the Sun campaign. It is a lot smaller and less dangerous, but it is a lot more difficult to spot too, since it shares almost the same sprite as foliage does. Some of them do not even have the give-away visual hints of holes in the ground.
MINI-BOSSES:
Some of the enemies in the game are much more powerful variants of otherwise “regular” enemies.
For convenience, they are called “mini-bosses” in this review. They have life-bars underneath their sprites, which make them stand out from the mobs of regular enemies and also indicate to the player how close they are to death. This is just as well, because they are incredibly troublesome enemies.
This is mainly because of their aura abilities; any nearby enemies, even those not of the same type, are subjected to their speed-increasing auras. Thus, mini-bosses make it easier for the enemies in this game to swamp the player characters.
The mini-bosses which appear later also have additional abilities. For example, there is a creepy sorcerer who can summon swarms of bats and send waves of fire in the eight cardinal directions.
The mini-bosses are intended as extra challenge for players, but ultimately, they are just as stupid as regular enemies. A patient player can lure them away from other mobs and deal with them while they are alone.
BOSSES:
As milestones of the player’s progress through a play-through, there are particularly powerful enemies which the player has to defeat. These are, of course, “bosses”.
These bosses tend to be massive creatures, with many types of attacks or tricks. Usually, they start with just a few of these, but eventually resort to more as they suffer more damage. This is indicated via a health bar on the left side of the screen; the bar has several notches, indicating when they will start using more attacks.
The boss fights also include environmental hazards and/or protection. For example, the first boss fight has a lot of traps which make dealing with the immobile boss more difficult than it seems.
Indeed, fighting these bosses can be entertaining challenges. In the case of those in Castle Hammerwatch, they are ended with substantial extra-life power-ups, which are satisfying rewards.
MOST PROBLEMATIC BOSS:
Unfortunately, not all of the boss fights in the game are fun. One of them, the arena of the Dune Sharks in the Temple of the Sun, is aggravating.
The problem with this boss is not how difficult it is, but rather how erratic it is. The bosses, the Dune Sharks, have no consistently predictable behavior patterns and unlike the other bosses in the game, do not have ever-present hitboxes.
The Dune Sharks operate by milling about as shadows on the sand; while they are in this state, they cannot be struck. They can only be damaged when they appear as huge maws (which are a reference to the Sandworms in the Dune franchise).
They are faster than any player character too, meaning that the player will not be outrun them. More often than not, the player would find that they can get ahead of his/her player character before opening their mouths.
This advantage is mitigated to a degree by their erratic appearances as maws, e.g. they may be some distance away when they open their mouths, but this also means that the boss fight has elements of luck as a factor.
Another problem with this boss fight is that there are multiple bosses, but the UI object for the bosses’ health is inadequate. The health meter for bosses is only suitable for individual bosses, not multiples of them. Consequently, the health meter resets every time the player hits a different Dune Shark, making the tracking of their individual health near-impossible.
There are also a lot of environmental hazards in this boss fight. There are insect swarms, which limit the player’s options when dodging the Dune Sharks. Worst of all, there are whirlpools which appear and disappear seemingly randomly, thus injecting even more elements of luck into the boss fight.
PRESENCE OF SECRETS:
The game has some additional challenges – and rewards – for players who are observant, inquisitive and/or determined.
In the original campaign, the player is introduced to the presence of secrets via some vague in-game hints. Most of these secrets provide more loot for the player, and the rest concerns another way with which to end the quest of Castle Hammerwatch.
Later, the player must learn to be observant. More often than not, a type of secret introduces itself through some visual oddity, such as cracks on walls, or some room which the player cannot immediately access.
Interestingly, when a type of secret introduces itself for the first time to a new player, it may not be the first example of its sort. After having learned about it, the player might want to backtrack to earlier levels in the original campaign to check for any secrets which he/she might have passed by.
In addition to hints like these, the game resorts to very low visual contrasts to hide switches and other oddities which a new player might miss if he/she had not been actively looking for them.
Having to squint one’s eyes for pixel-hunts is not very fun, however.
The game does make use of a cheesy design trope for secret areas: false walls. False walls which look like regular walls do not make for fun secret-hunting because the player has to press his/her player character against walls, which is tedious. Fortunately, Hammerwatch does not repeat this mistake in its entirety.
This slight deviation from the design trope is much welcome, though the game could have resorted to more intuitive visual hints.
The final and most typical visual hint which the game uses are objects suspended in walls. These are indicative of secret areas which are not depicted in the player’s map. For better or worse, getting to them is often not a matter of looking for false walls or destructible walls; rather, they require a lot more busywork.
SHORT-CUTS AND EASY PATHS:
Some of the secrets in the game grant the player alternate paths to otherwise dangerously trap-ridden but usually optional corridors which lead to loot. These are the most satisfying secrets to find. A player who has lost extra lives to these corridors would be quite aggravated upon learning about them, but that would be much deserved self-kicking.
HOMAGE AND REFERENCES:
Some of the secrets in Hammerwatch make tributes to games which the designers might have played. In the case of the Steam version of the game, they are often associated with the Steam achievements for the game.
They might tickle the toes of players who have fond memories of these old games, but less amused players may wonder why these games are referenced, especially when they have little to do with Hammerwatch’s designs.
However, the other references are more appropriate, a lot more entertaining and also a lot more practical in terms of rewards.
These references pay tribute to the main sources of inspiration for Hammerwatch, namely the original Gauntlet (and perhaps Tower of Druaga).
These secrets transport the player(s) to levels which seem ripped right out of the original Gauntlet, complete with its music and sprites for exits, treasure chests and keys. There are also a lot of weak mooks to plow through and hyper-active spawn-generators to shut down.
The player’s rewards for having located these levels are a lot of wealth, as well as (usually) ways to reach previously isolated goodies.
GAMES OF CHANCE:
For whatever reason, there are some secrets which give the player randomized rewards. These are usually depicted through rooms with floor-based switches, one of which the player has to activate in order to receive the reward(s).
The player may be given one or two items as rewards, whereas luckier players may get all three or even four. The patterns on the floor in these rooms may be a reference to something, but otherwise no players have managed to figure them out.
SEMI-LINEARITY OF CASTLE HAMMERWATCH:
The original campaign, which is set in Castle Hammerwatch, has sprawling levels which actually has the player progressing through them in a semi-linear fashion. Eventually, after clearing a wing of a level, the player would find a way or shortcut to return to junctions or even the starting point of the map.
These maps designs are hardly new in video games. However, they are convenient and go a long way to compensate for the considerable reliance on traps for the later levels, as had been mentioned earlier in this article.
BACKTRACKING IN TEMPLE OF THE SUN:
For better or worse, the Temple of the Sun campaign seems to be reverse of Castle Hammerwatch when it comes to map designs.
Where Castle Hammerwatch sends players in looping paths, the Temple of the Sun requires players to backtrack often to levels which the player has gone through before. To players who are used to Castle Hammerwatch’s straight-forward level designs, this can seem bothersome.
EXPANDED COUNTERS IN TEMPLE OF THE SUN:
In order to accommodate the fetch quests and additional busywork in the Temple of the Sun campaign, the user interface includes additional counters for items which the player would pick up. They can seem like a lot of clutter.
DIFFICULTY MODIFIERS:
At its default settings, Hammerwatch provides a manageable challenge to any skilled player. However, the experience may seem all too familiar eventually.
Therefore, to inject some artificial longevity into the gameplay, there is a system of modifiers which can be applied on any play-through before it starts. These modifiers seem straight-forward, but they make the game harder in more ways than one.
The simplest difficulty modifiers are the over-arching “difficulty” setting. It controls the ratio of damage which the heroes inflict to the damage which enemies can mete out.
One of the nastiest difficulty modifiers is the 1HP challenge. The mechanism of health, which has been mentioned earlier, is thrown out the window if the player (or hosting player, in the case of multiplayer) chooses this modifier. It also renders many strategies, such as the Paladin’s “tank-and-spank”, useless and takes several major gameplay elements, namely healing, out of the experience.
The disabling of mana regeneration is one of the most manageable. It also happens to encourage wiser decisions on the part of players.
Enabling modifiers which make the game harder does not result in more rewards of the practical sort, however. Instead, what the player gets is a score multiplier at the end of a play-through for the purpose of greater bragging rights.
Interestingly, the game also has modifiers which make the game easier; it derisively refers to them as “crutches”. These inflict dividers on the player’s score instead.
Competent players probably would not need them, but they do help new players enjoy Hammerwatch a lot more easily.
HERO SURVIVAL:
In addition to the campaign modules at this time of writing, there is the module of Hero Survival. This one works differently from the campaign modules.
Firstly, the currency of coins has been replaced with crystals. Crystals are not gained as loot; instead they are mainly gained over time, as long as the player’s hero is still alive. However, the difficulty of the experience also increases over time, usually commensurably.
Initially, it may not seem possible to spend these crystals. The player appears to be trapped in a cave system full of these crystals and always-spawning enemies. Observant – or well-informed – players would eventually realize that the shop to spend crystals in is, for whatever reason, placed behind a concealed area.
After finding the shop, the player might have an inclination to camp near the portal to the shop. However, as mentioned earlier, the difficulty of the game mode increases over time, and can eventually surpass the advantage which the player gains from automatically gathering crystals over time.
Therefore, the player must move about the caverns, looking for particularly large crystals to hit for additional moolah. However, each of them has a limited amount of crystals to mine before the player has to leave it to mine other crystals while waiting for it to replenish.
Roaming around for crystals is easier said than done of course. New enemies are always spawning into the map to hunt down the player character. There are also a lot of environmental hazards, the worst of which are cave-ins which can kill almost any character outright. Some traps in the cave can be disabled, but only temporarily before they reset.
HERO DEFENCE:
Tower defense is quite an infectious fad, and it seems to have affected Hammerwatch too.
In this module, the player characters must prevent waves of monsters from reaching one end of the map. Barring glitches which make them forget their applied scripts, the monsters generally will not attack the player characters. However, the game increases their speed across the board and also makes them tougher over time.
As of version 1.3, the player can purchase the installation of traps, which only work against the monsters. Indeed, their use is very much required if the player intends to get far in this module.
AUTO-MAP ISSUE:
One of the biggest problems concerning the user-friendliness of Hammerwatch is the rigidity of its auto-map system.
With a tap of a button, the player can bring up a translucent overlay of the map of the current level. This overlay is centered on the player’s character, with his/her icon right on top of his/her sprite.
Although such a design helps the player’s orientation of the whereabouts of his/her character vis-à-vis his/her immediate surroundings, it is inadequate for checking whether the player has overlooked nooks and crannies which are further away.
MULTIPLAYER:
Although any player can play Hammerwatch on his/her own lonesome, the game is generally more entertaining when played with other people.
Of course, the perception of the experience would be incredibly subjective from player to player and from session to session. On one end, the player may end up playing with terribly inexperienced players who drain the team’s pool of extra lives with their carelessness.
On the other extreme end, the experienced player might play alongside similarly experienced players. Ironically, playing with other players who know what they are supposed to be doing and do them well can seem an all-too-familiar – and thus very dull - experience.
Lag between the players can also result in issues when the players are attempting to transition to another level. The game’s attempts to harmonize all of them can result in long waits, longer than those the player experiences when playing alone.
When romping through a level, the players may choose to simply split apart. After all, having multiple players in a level does not seem to result in a commensurate increase in challenge. On the other hand, the players have to be experienced at handling enemies alone. It also defeats the purpose of multiplayer.
The limitations of the auto-map feature are amplified in multiplayer. It can be aggravating to watch other players confirm for their own eyes that a nook or cranny has been explored by backtracking while the player waits at the exit of a level, convinced that the level has been cleared out.
However, the game augments the auto-map in multiplayer in a few ways.
Each player character has his/her icon in the auto-map. Each of these icons has lines radiating from it, pointed towards the other icons and thus the positions of the other player characters. The lengths of these lines also indicate the relative distances between the player’s own character and the other characters.
As convenient as this is though, it is not a substitute or completely effective compensation for the rigidity of the auto-map.
VISUAL DESIGNS – IN GENERAL:
If the screenshots which have been shown thus far are not indicative enough already, it has to be said here that the game makes use of pixel art.
Any sprite which looks vaguely humanoid is made using super-deformed artstyles. Thus, they look quite cute – at least until they die horribly messy deaths (and this is despite the visual obliteration due to the pixel art). Each of the character classes has the dubious honor of having one of the grisliest death animations in the game.
Speaking of animations, there are not a lot to be seen in the game. Most if not all characters are stiff and lack expressions of emotion. Of course, one could argue that this is not important, considering that Hammerwatch’s forte is not convincing graphics.
However, there are significant issues in the visual designs, as will be elaborated shortly.
PALETTE-SWAP ENEMIES:
In the original campaign of Castle Hammerwatch, some enemies had not benefited from more attention to their visual designs.
The result is that there are some enemies which are practically palette swaps of each other, looking a bit different in terms of colour, number of pixels or sprite size.
This would not be an issue for enemies which function similar to each other, such as skeletal warriors of different grades of durability. However, it is an issue when the player deals with enemies which have very different sets of abilities. Examples of these include the different mages and sorcerers which the player would fight.
Some practice of observation would eventually help the player differentiate and recognize such enemies with a glance. Yet, all that effort would have been unnecessary if there had been more visual differences between the sprites.
The developers have given more attention to differentiating the sprites of enemies in the Temple of the Sun campaign. However, they did not see fit to revisit the sprite designs in the Castle Hammerwatch campaign.
VIEW-OBSCURING OVERHEAD OBJECTS:
In the Castle Hammerwatch campaign, there are a couple of levels with places where the player’s view of the action is partially obscured by grill-like edifices.
This would not have been an issue if the grills are thin, but they are not. Their borders are thick enough to obscure the sprites of humanoid-sized enemies, whereas the regions within their borders can obscure projectiles and small enemies like bats and slimes.
This issue is not repeated in the Temple of the Sun campaign, fortunately. Yet, the grills remain in Castle Hammerwatch at this time of writing.
NEW AND THE OLD:
The relative primitiveness of the pixel art graphics is contrasted against more brilliant graphical artifices. An example of the latter is the visual effects which are used for flames (which look brilliant) and projectiles (which move smoothly across the screen).
SOUND DESIGNS:
The first aspect of Hammerwatch’s sound designs also happens to be its best, fortunately. This is its music, which is composed by Two Feathers Studio.
The music starts itself off with the stirring main theme, which is used for the main menu. Next, each set of floors in Castle Hammerwatch has its own soundtrack. They may not thematically match the looks of the floors; for example, the exciting “At the Gates” track does not match the dank environs of the sewers of the castle, and the player certainly did not start in front of any gates.
Nevertheless, the soundtracks for Castle Hammerwatch have heart-thumping melodies which give the impression that the player is experiencing an epic (though of course he/she is not).
The soundtracks for the Temple of the Sun campaign do sound a bit stereotypical, but they are definitely more thematically matching with the ancient Egypt-inspired environs seen in that campaign.
The individual soundtracks are also packaged together with the game, which makes for great value.
LEVEL EDITOR:
The game package also comes with a level editor, complete with the tools which the developers used to create the official modules.
However, it did not exactly come with a manual. Guides for the level editor have to be found elsewhere, outside of the game's package.
Nevertheless, considering that there had been some levels which had been made for the Steam Workshop section for this game, it is a satisfactorily functioning feature of Hammerwatch.
CONCLUSION:
If one is to be reductive, Hammerwatch does not really break any new ground. What metaphorical ground it treads on already has its foundations laid by the likes of Gauntlet and Tower of Druaga. Nevertheless, Hammerwatch recreates what its sources of inspiration did quite well. However, It could have done better if not for its issues of user-friendliness.