Hammerwatch

There's precious little depth lurking in Hammerwatch, then, but if you've got a few friends handy or are willing to wait around online for the worryingly small community to make itself known, this is genuine old-fashioned skeleton-bashing with a gloriously tidal approach to chucking in the enemies.

For just ten of your dollars, you can have this game in all its glory on Steam. That’s pretty good value, and lucky are those who get to purchase it on a sale. In any case though, if you are an RPG fan and you like to kick it old school, then this should fit the bill just right. If you have friend to play with, then even better.

As a solo venture, the game can feel boring and tedious as it starts off way too slowly, despite throwing in some interesting boss fights later on. My recommendation is that you play it with friends, chat over some third-party voice program, and forget about your worries as you mindlessly slay hundreds upon hundreds of worms and skeletons and bugs and bats.

You probably noticed that the word 'tedious' and 'tedium' was thrown around an awful lot there. Unfortunately, if you had to sum up Hammerwatch in one word, it would be 'tedious'. It's a very competent game, achieves everything that it sets out to achieve, and for the first 3 or 4 hours provides a great amount of fun. It's even pretty to look at!

I didn’t play that much of it… well, I only got past the first boss (We still gotta find out how to save in multiplayer). I don’t think the rest of the game will be any different. Harder, maybe, but game-play wise most likely the same. Out of what I played.

Essentially, Hammerwatch benefits from all the strengths of Gauntlet and fails in all the ways Gauntlet did with a few factors of its own thrown in to just barely solidify its place. I certainly enjoyed Hammerwatch despite its flaws and refusal to attempt to evolve its old school game design. Not every throwback game can be Out There Somewhere or Rogue Legacy.

It is everything that turns off a lot of people to Indy games. It’s incredibly niche, it’s ‘hardcore’ by having frustrating game mechanics, and I imagine some people will defend it’s unfriendliness as a quality rather than a flaw. If the game had character progression and a better multiplayer system I’d have gladly given this game high marks, instead to me it falls...

It's one of those games that will inspire you to check every corner of every wall, smacking it with your melee weapon just in case there's a breakable tile nearby. No matter how many times you die or how unfair that maggot boss seems, you and your friends will keep trying again and again and again.