Hammerwatch

What a nice little game to play from time to time

Conceptually, Hammerwatch should be a blast, it's essentially a modern-ish version of Gauntlet, but it frequently feels weirdly vindictive toward the player, stacking traps and enemies in combinations that seem impossible to overcome without numerous deaths, locking the end of its main campaign behind untracked collectibles, and running on for much longer than could conceivably be fun. It's not even legitimately hard, just infuriating.

Very simple gameplay and progression. The story is simple too: You are a nameless character who tries to find the way out of a dungeon. That's the whole story. The combat is simple. You hit, they die. You do combo hits after you buy them; you do more hits, and they die faster. You buy upgrades; they die faster. It gets boring pretty fast.

It's a classic. Solid game design, although it's a little on the simple side. A nice improvement from the games that inspired it. I do wish there were a few alternate weapons for each class, since you mostly use the exact same attack the entire campaign. And enemy behavior is a bit shallow, could have used some more interesting enemy types to spice things up. But overall a pretty fun game, especially in co-op. It's on the easier side, but it has a brutal mechanic where your lives are limited for the whole campaign. Some classes are way better than others, so that's something to take into consideration. (Wizard is OP, Paladin is very hard) Definitely worth getting if you like fast paced shooters and arcade style action. The 2nd campaign is great but there are moments of too much back-tracking in empty areas. And yeah, there's 2 campaigns, each one will take you nearly 10 hours to beat, so there's plenty of content. If you're pretty good at these types of games, I'd say start on Hard mode, since the Medium difficulty is quite a bit too easy. Enemies rarely kill me, but watch out for those nasty traps, they're often 1-hit kills. 8/10 for a 2d twin-stick shooter.

I came for the hack, stayed for the slash. A very good dungeon-crawler.

Planks