Hammerwatch

You know it's the sign of a good game when you sit back after beating it and realize it's 3am. If this entry seems a little rushed, I think you probably have your reason why. (As for why all the other May Mastery entries seem rushed, well... I... I'll fill in this part with something pithy tomorrow when I can think straight.) Hammerwatch more or less ended as it began with its hectic top-down crowd control-focused combat, but something curious happens to its late game if you invest enough in the combo system: the near invulnerable state when you hit ten kills in quick succession is triggered more and more often in the lower (well, higher) levels of the dungeon because of the even larger volume of enemies. So instead of the danger of being overwhelmed by swarming hordes, which was the ever-present fear in the early game, having a large crowd of low-level grunts to blaze your way through puts you in that combo state more often and you'll find that it's the means of surviving the real peril in those levels: the many traps and the wizard enemies, which come in far smaller groups but present a bigger nuisance with the way they'll harangue you with magical bolts and leave totems behind when they die, which provide any number of maladies to yourself and benefits to the enemies still remaining. It's a paradigm shift I wasn't expecting, and it helped make passing through the final dungeon floors as memorable as the early game, so big kudos to the developers Crackshell for that coup.

In an effort to paint the game's appeal in broad strokes last time, I should probably focus on a few of Hammerwatch's clever little features that helped sustain its considerable play length. Features like the vendor tokens, each of which permanently increases the discount you get from all vendors in the game, making them more valuable than any treasure in the long run. There are the skills, of which each hero appears to have three. The ranger I used had bombs that they could leave behind for pursuers, but could also acquire a skill that entangled nearby enemies to slow them down and a 360 degree spread shot that quickly allowed the player to enter the combo state. I've no doubt the other hero skills are just as applicable to their classes. Then there are the bosses and how the battle subtly changes after each quarter of the boss's health bar is diminished. With that first boss I mentioned last time, a giant grub queen, the battle grew in intensity at 75% boss health, when the side walls opened to reveal more enemies that threatened to pincer you between themselves and the boss, then at 50% boss health, when the arrow traps on the north wall started firing indiscriminately into the arena, meaning you had to dodge those as well as the boss's attacks and finally at 25% boss health, where the far floor tiles became instant-death spike traps, and your playing field was limited to a small square around the boss. Before 25%, there was a small nook at the top right of the arena that allowed you to avoid the boss's spreadshot attack, but this became untenable at the 25% mark. It's as if the game is suggesting to the player that their hopes of cheesing the boss without incident are now dashed.

Hammerwatch isn't perfect, though what few reservations I have about the game are trivial but for this one: it just doesn't have the longevity that a loot RPG like Diablo or a roguelike has, in part because there isn't that constant drip-feed of slightly better equipment that encourages you to keep playing new game plus after new game plus, but also because the game is deliberately limited in its scope and customization options. That's by design, rather than an unintended fault with the game: Hammerwatch is deliberately meant to hearken back to Gauntlet and a simpler age of Arcade top-down shoot 'em ups with the trappings of a fantasy RPG, and while the game provides a few different routes for power-ups they're on the whole perfunctory and necessary numerical boosts to damage output and intake with a small amount of player agency regarding which skills they want to invest into and how much they want to rely on the combo system (which, as stated above, becomes godlike on later floors of the dungeon). Even with a higher difficulty and a number of other classes left to try, the game's dungeon layouts and secrets won't change and neither will the core gameplay, and after some ten hours or so of investigating practically every wall for switches and illusions I'm less inclined to jump back in with another hero. Like most dungeon crawlers that aren't randomly generated, once you've uncovered all the secret passageways, grown powerful enough to crush mountains and defeated that final boss, there's little impetus to do it all over again. Maybe that's just my take on this genre though.

The Verdict: Another pleasant surprise, Hammerwatch is a little barebones but you can't beat its Arcade approach to the humble Indie dungeon-crawler or its appealing scaled-down aesthetic. Easily the best Gauntlet-inspired game since, well, Gauntlet 2. Five Stars.

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