Hammerwatch 2 is a bold step in a baffling direction

destructoid.com:

To put everything I’m about to say into context, I don’t know if anyone has anticipated Hammerwatch 2 as much as I have.

The original Hammerwatch, released in 2013 by Crackshell, was the co-op indie game I played for months. It was a Gauntlet-style dungeon crawler with distinct character classes, lite RPG elements, and neat mod support. It’s a short game that you can clear in under four hours, but I got so much replay value out of it in part thanks to Crackshell’s ongoing support. Heck, it got an entirely new campaign, Temple of the Sun, as free DLC. Steam says I put over 40 hours into this one.

Meanwhile, 2018’s Heroes of Hammerwatch remixed the original game’s assets into a Roguelite structure. Man did I put hours into this one. Heroes took that arcadey co-op fun from the original and gave it enough progression elements to make it really hard to put down. It offered so much to upgrade that it was easy to want one more run before falling asleep at 3:00am. This too had great post-launch support; I even double-dipped on the Switch version just so I could play it with more people.

This all leads us to Hammerwatch 2, which on paper looks to be the series’ greatest evolution yet. Not only do we have much prettier pixel art, but we have an open-world RPG filled with quests, optional dungeons, loot to find and craft, and a real storyline to follow. After having such fun experiences with the previous two games, I had no idea how something that looks this good could go wrong.

Unfortunately, it did. It absolutely, indubitably did.

For full disclosure, I couldn’t finish Hammerwatch 2 in time for a full review. I put in nearly 20 hours, though that was between two characters for reasons I’ll discuss later. Take that as you will.

Ha