Hammerwatch

Genre: Action, Adventure, Indie, RPG

Developer: Crackshell

Publisher: Crackshell

System: Windows, Mac, Linux

If I judged every game I played based on the first ten minutes starting with the moment I opened the program I would probably review half of them as shit. I wanted to jump right into Hammerwatch’s multiplayer, because I felt it would lead to a more interesting review of the game, but, like many gamers, I have a friend that uses a Mac. And Apple and Hammerwatch do not get along very well. In fact, you need to install an additional program that Mac users seem not to trust, which sounds silly since Macs are impenetrable fortresses.

Anyway, about an hour of fiddling around with this problem and we were good to go. We logged in and chose our classes. I went with the Warlock, a robed figure with a staff and a penchant for stabbing creatures with a short, poisoned, dagger. The warlock is best known for having the most health of the four classes and his ability to cast a lightning ball of doom that electrocutes everything in its path and does massive amounts of damage. In other words I took the overpowered class. OK, that’s probably not fair, because the ranger shoots arrows endlessly and poops bombs that make it easy to run away from enemies while dealing a lot of damage. Not fair.

The game begins in a dungeon – or a castle, I guess – and you are told that the bridge you just crossed has been destroyed and, well, that’s it, good luck. No tutorial explains the controls, no popup lets you know how to fight. This may be different in single player mode, and I suppose you can look at the keybindings, but if it weren’t for my good pal Sean I would have died in about ten seconds. I know this, because that’s about the time a cloud of bats came flying at me. I had to think fast, LIGHTNING BALL! The bats fried like a shattered egg on a sidewalk on a steamy summer day. It felt good.

 

Next came a wave of beetles, LIGHTNING BALL! Guess we’re serving up toasted bug-flesh for breakfast. Beyond those were the larval spawn of venom-spitting worms, LIGHTNING BALL! Piece of cake. I’m getting hungry. Then came more bats, LIGHTN- out of juice. RUN! So you can’t just spam your special ability, which makes sense, I guess. Instead, you have to get good at using your main ability (stabby stabby poison dagger) until your energy recharges or you eat some energy crystals, but once you get that energy back…LIGHTNING BALL! AH HAHAHAHAHA! BURN! BURN!

Happy Thoughts: Hammerwatch is very rewarding in that it is not easy. The controls are stupidly simple, but getting good at the individual classes can be difficult. That poison dagger work takes finesse.

Sad Thoughts: I never thought I’d ever hear myself say this, but the Mac version needs to be fixed. The least they could do is mention the need for an additional program on Steam.

The Bottom Line: If Hammerwatch posted itself on a dating site it would probably look like this: Fun, pixelated, dungeon crawler seeks nerd for a magical night. Friends welcome.