Written by Patrick Orquia
Title: Heroes of Hammerwatch - Ultimate Edition
Developer: Crackshell
Publisher: Blitworks
Genre: Action Adventure, RPG, Roguelite
Number of Players: 1
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Release Date: July 29, 2020
Price: $19.99
I like roguelike/roguelite games, even though they incite violent rage in me when I play them. Ok, no, not violent. I just cuss a lot and maybe scream loud enough for the people next door to call the cops on me. As frustrating as these games could be, there is one thing that is for sure: they are very fun to play, because they make me continuously get better at the game by learning from my past mistakes bit by bit and force me to try new strategies to keep me from dying over and over again.
Heroes of Hammerwatch is a roguelite RPG game, wherein you play as a warrior who has to explore dungeons to accumulate money and ores to rebuild the town of Outlook. As expected with roguelite games, you will die a lot of times in the process. This game is very punishing early on and the gameplay gets very repetitive very fast, but if you have the tendency to get addicted to the risk-reward cycle of games such as this, you could end up spending hours upon hours trying to level up and earn money and other rewards.
At the start of the game, you get to choose which warrior class you want your character to be and customize its looks to your liking. The game has 16-bit aesthetics, and your character and the rest of the visuals will look pixelated, but still, you get to create it and see how the game will show it in all of its pixel-y goodness. You can create multiple characters in a single save file, and they all share resources. This is a good game mechanic because it offers you multiple ways to tackle the challengers of the game, since different classes have different attack styles and skills. Plus you don't want to get stuck with just a paladin character. Maybe you would want a ranger or a wizard, too, depending on your mood.
The game is presented as a dungeon crawler, where your character has to battle hordes of enemies that will try to kill you in large numbers at first sight in large, procedurally-generated dungeons sectioned into rooms and corridors. There are two types of attacks, one is a normal attack, either melee or ranged, and the other is skill, which uses mana points (MP). Additional skills get unlocked as you progress. You get experience points upon defeating these enemies. If you defeat enough enemies in quick succession without getting hit, you will enter a combo state that makes your character move faster and hit harder, and you could also generate HP and MP. Some of the rooms contain loot such as gold, food, and the elusive ores. These ores are used to unlock new establishments that would provide permanent skill upgrades, temporary buffs, and other goodies.
At the beginning of the game, you start with the first dungeon, the mines. It is divided into four floors, with the last one containing a boss that you need to defeat to proceed to the next one. The bosses can be quite hard to beat, as they have a large HP plus waves of enemies also join fray, so you have to keep on moving and keep on killing, or risk getting killed yourself. The other dungeons are presented the same way. If or when you die, you end up back to the town, with all of your temporary abilities and unsaved gold/ores gone. This kind of stings, but typical for a roguelite game. But wait, you ask, unsaved gold/ores? Well, in this game, you are required to send to town the money you collect from the dungeons. Some floors will have an elevator that goes back to town where you can put the gold and ores you have collected so far. This will be your savings, minus some taxes. The game does not specifically explain this, and I personally wasted a few runs earning nothing because I didn't know that I had to do this. Not all floors have this, so the further you go without saving your money, the greater the risk that you have, plus the louder you scream when you die.
By the way, this game implements a cool way of skipping floors to advance to dungeons that you have already visited: at the starting floor of the preceding dungeon, you can find a portal that leads to a challenge room. Where you have to survive many waves of enemies in order to advance to the succeeding dungeon. The goal is to break a cube at the center of the room and as long as it is intact, the waves of enemies don't stop. Surviving this room will reward you with 8 FREE temporary buffs that you can use for the rest of your run (they disappear when you die). Typically, buffs can be bought at a shop in the town or found in treasure chests and NPCs inside the dungeons. These buffs add up and work alongside one another, so the more buffs you have equipped, the more fighting chance your character gets in surviving the dungeons.
The more you progress into the game, and hopefully you get more and more skilled in killing enemies and saving those precious coins and ores, the more you can build up the town. Town upgrades require a certain amount of ores, so yes, you will really spend hours upon hours grinding in the dungeons to upgrade them. But if you do manage to upgrade the establishments, you will reap the benefits, because you can then have more options to upgrade your character… for it to be more capable of killing more enemies and collecting loot and goodies. Rinse and repeat.
To somehow break the monotony of repetitive gameplay, you can try playing with other people, either local or online. The local multiplayer is fun and makes traversing dungeons easier, since you get to share the load of killing the multitude of enemies, plus you get to share a high five with your friends every so often, or maybe yell at them if they die more than you do. The online multiplayer is a bit of a mixed bag, as trying to find parties to join or people to join your own party can be a bit hard. Maybe the game is not being played as much by other people on the Switch, which is quite a shame. This version of the game also comes with all the DLCs that have been available for the game so far (it has been out and available to other platforms for a couple of years now). The new areas still play basically the same, but with tougher challenges, which will really test your skills. Oh, and the game also has a New Game+, so really, your grinding and killing spree will not stop if you so choose.
Overall, Heroes of Hammerwatch – Ultimate Edition is a good game that has a lot to offer. It has cool visuals and aesthetics, with an equally cool soundtrack to wrap everything together. It has a steep learning curve, but once you get the hang of the gameplay, you'll soon find yourself being a very capable warrior that can go toe to toe against the toughest of enemies. So if you are aching for a good roguelite game, give this game a go and put your dungeon exploration skills to the test.
REPLAY VALUE: Very high
PROS
- Cool visuals with 16-bit aesthetics
- Catchy soundtrack to keep you moving as you explore the dungeons
- Wide range of customization options to suit your play style
- High degree of enemy types
- Repetitive yet very addicting and enjoyable gameplay
- Very challenging, with a steep learning curve at the beginning, but very rewarding as you progress further into the game
- Has a surprisingly good amount of content
- Has local and online multiplayer options
CONS
- Characters look very tiny, especially in handheld mode
- Looks very dark in handheld mode, which make it even harder to differentiate enemies and traps
- Very grind-heavy
- Some dungeon floors don't have the elevator for saving gold and ores, and thus result to high frustration when you die because you lose everything unsaved
- Frame rate drops are encountered when there is too much action happening on screen
- Can be hard to find online parties to join or players to join your own party
RATING: 4/5 Hammerwatch heroes and villains
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