I struggle to like Hammerwatch II. Crackshell’s latest entry in their Hammerwatch series is sure to attract a fanbase. This isometric action rpg is far from what I would call a “bad game,” and it has quite a lot of charm that I’m sure will captivate many people. Personally, though, I found Hammerwatch II to be a janky experience with undercooked mechanics that was ill-adapted for console play.
Still, Hammerwatch II is a gorgeous game to behold. The game’s fantasy world is brought to life excellently through its pixel graphics and gorgeous soundtrack. Environments are vibrant and unique, and the lighting helps give the various environments a good sense of ambience. The day-and-night cycle also gives Hammerwatch 2’s open world a good sense of realism, even if it does lead to frustrating game mechanics. My biggest problem with Hammerwatch II’s look is how it poorly conveys certain things in the environment. Breakable walls in dungeons often feel invisible to the player as they often blend into the background, and other interactable objects in the environment feel similarly poorly conveyed.
Hammerwatch II’s fantasy world is very familiar to those already in love with RPG’s. At the start of each game, players are given a choice between a handful of character classes ranging from wizards, sorcerers, and rogues (my personal pick for my first playthrough). Every class plays differently from each other, offering a nice gameplay variety for multiple playthroughs. While nothing here reaches Baldur’s Gate’s level of player expression, it’s still a very good system that allows for a lot of freedom when creating a character. My favorite aspect was the character voices seemingly affecting the personality of your character. The voice I chose for my Rogue ended up giving her a very timid disposition, and I could often hear her shouting “I’m sorry!” or “I’m not sure what I’m doing” during fights. It’s a personal touch that I very much appreciated.
Unfortunately, the game’s controls on console prevent me from falling in love with it. The game tries to adapt its PC control scheme to controllers with a twin-stick control scheme, with the left stick controlling your character’s movement and the right stick controlling which direction they face. Unfortunately, I often found the right stick to be too imprecise when in the thick of combat. Aiming ranged attacks felt too unreliable, and the melee attacks would whiff and miss the enemy.
This imprecision also affects how you navigate menus. When accessing your menu, you are meant to use the left stick to scroll down to where you want to go and the right stick as a sort of mouse to interact with what you want, but scrolling with the left stick feels too stiff to maneuver. This forces you to wrestle with the mouse to get anything done, but it lacks the precision of a real mouse to reliably click on what you need. This is made worse by how complicated the menus are. With no options to sort your equipment, you’ll have to slog your way to whatever you want to find to get anything done.
Finally, I had a few minor gripes with the game that further hampered my enjoyment. While I like the day/night cycle as an aesthetic choice, the night making it so that merchants won’t trade with you is very frustrating. Nights are generally pretty long, so your two choices are spending gold to stay at an inn, or (if you’ve lost the gold to this game’s punishing death system) waiting until sunrise. I also found the game’s handling of quests to be very vague. The game’s quests can be pretty vague in where you have to go, made worse by the fact that they often don’t have markers that point you to where you need to go or to the quest-giver. While I can understand the mindset for a couple of these design choices, I found that they both made the game more annoying than fun.
In the end, Hammerwatch II is a game that unfortunately disappointed me. While I could forgive some of the more annoying design elements if the game was fun to play, I found that the ill-fitting controller set-up made the game a frustrating romp through a familiar fantasy world. While I’m sure the PC version handles better, I’m giving the Nintendo Switch version of Hammerwatch II a 5/10.
For more information, visit http://hammerwatch.com/
Related: Reviews by Josh Freeman
I love games and love talking about games. Some of my favorites include action games (both 2D and 3D), metroidvanias, roguelikes, shooters, and Indies.
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