Heroes of Hammerwatch II Steam Charts & Stats

Fun game, good basic rpg recommend if you have a good lot of friends.

While I was disappointed with the lack of complexity going into this, as a person unfamiliar with previous Hammerwatch titles, it's still firmly in the category of mindless fun. I do wish there was more randomization in the runs and more clarity regarding some of the meta progression.

For some people, this appears to be a fun game. And possibly if you push long enough to get deeper into it than just Forest 1 & 2, it could be. The problem I have is the way they chose to implement the rogue-lite aspects of the game make playing it extremely tedious. You have no free agency to take what you've collected mid-run and go home, it's either play till you die, or play till you literally finish the entire game, if you don't want to lose 40% of the materials etc you've gathered. Then there are the randomness of the generated zones each time, normally this would be a good thing for me in any game. I loved that in Diablo 2, wish more games were like that. One big difference here though, there are specific locations that are necessary for progression, ie. the doors to the Dark Citadel won't open till you find the Architect (apparently), however it's random if he will show up in your map or not. Does this gate things for you so that you have to play through the forest map, possibly numerous times, before unlocking the door into the Citadel? Yes, yes it does. Is that a good thing, to force you to gain equipment and levels before venturing further? Theoretically, yes. However playing through basically the same level 3-6 times just to progress, is not fun. The layout does change, but the enemies and how they operate, does not. They show up in the same formations, generally in the same sorts of locations, each time. The fact that no matter how successfully you clear them, you can't just go back to town... it sucks, bad. Because you can get to the end of that "run", not find the guy who opens the doors, simply because he randomly did not show up, and your only choice is to abandon run, which gives the same penalty as dieing. That's what is "rogue-lite" about the game, no matter how "good" you might be, you will die, because the game demands it. The tutorial gives the impression that finishing a map = finishing a run. That's NOT the case. Finishing a map just means advancing to the next map, the run continues. And on and on. Till you die, or end up "stuck" with no way to advance, then abandon and start over, but lose 40% of what you collected along the way. it's mind boggling to me how all of these devs for different games can admire what was done with Diablo 2 (including the devs who worked on Diablo 3 and 4), seek to replicate it in their own way, and completely miss the bus on what made the game fun. Frustrating. Ultimately the game is geared towards a very niche subset of a playerbase for an already rather niche genre of gaming. If you fit that niche within a niche, then you just might love this game. It's got good graphics if isometric sprite style is up your alley (it is for me, I genuinely love the graphics for this). It's got a fun, albeit simplisitic take on the Dialbo'esque style of ARPG combat and controls. One of the the most important aspects of games for me these days, it allows you to rebind every necessary command in the game, and it allows for most of the keyboard to be used including the arrow keys, the NUMPAD keys and the set of 6 keys above the arrow keys. Rescuing NPC's you meet and sending them back to help build up your camp into a town with services etc, is a really neat and fun aspect I would love to explore more. Only problem was, I got bored playing through Forest 1 and Forest 2, over and over and over. Path of Exile and Diablo 2 are still the only ARPG style games worth playing IMO, imposing an element of rogue-lite play for this one, did not do it any favors. Also, in reading the discussions I noticed a lot of talk about using an Enchanter in town (once you unlock them), that lets you reroll any item to be the item you need, and reroll any stats to be the stats you need. Useful I suppose, if the game isn't dropping stuff you need for the specific character you're running, but ultimately diffuses a main aspect of ARPG play, ie. finding cool loot and the excitement when you see a yellow/orange item drop and get your hopes up that it'll add something cool and unique to your character's combat. Didn't get far enough to experience that myself, but it doesn't sound all that exciting to just reroll all your gear to the stats you want. If the game allows that, it seriously needs other aspects of the game to be stellar, as just grinding for another drop to reroll gets old, super fast. Also, for all that it's sold as a "finished game" ie. it is NOT in Early Access, the game is not finished or done, by any means. The developer and their team of support (it apparently has just the one developer) is still putting out updates and players have been clamoring for additional content and gear drops etc, since this past January, at least. A new update is set to drop soon (June-July 2025), so the game hasn't been abandoned by any means. It's just also not "finished" - by any means.

I've played it with my friend for 1.5 hours and it's been one of the most boring coop hours we've ever had. The gameplay loop is very dull - you just go, you just shoot ~2 types of spells, pick resources, done. Not enough variation, not enough dynamics. Pixel nature is awesome though

I am 10 hours in so far and I cannot put it down. I’m obsessed and as a long time rogue-lite fan, I’m telling you to try it out. Maybe a little slow or difficult at first…. But so worth it. I love a good grind and this is definitely that. Competitive if you want to push NG+ ranks, very co-op friendly, fun gameplay, enough customization you can feel unique amongst a group but not to the point where it’s overwhelming or impossible beyond metas. I plan to play this game relentlessly and religiously for hundreds more hours until they (god please please please) release DLC. Already trying to get several of my friends to buy it and I recommend you do too.

There is maybe 10 - 15 hours of content. After first successful run, there is nothing left to go for. Classes don't have enough variety in them. Couple of skills, that is all. You will have seen all this game has to offer.

Fun to play with friends. Probably not worth it otherwise. There's a lot of metaprogression to get through, and on top of that gear drops very randomly so it's difficult to put together interesting builds. Consider it a thumbs sideways.

We beat the game in 12 hours, which is absolutely fine, but hadnt even scratched the surface of the base building and also never tried other classes than the two we started with. However we also both didnt feel any incentive to play the maps again as other characters or even touch the NG+. I enjoyed it quite a lot, but its short and theres not really much of a story.

This game is pretty good, but I'm pissed off that I was sold a complete game, when it obviously should have been in early-access.

Have to say i am extremely disappointed in this game. The game loop is very dull with very little of any variation and even with the slightly different random tiles sets, everything else in the tile set is still the same as every other tile set. The meta progression feels tedious as hell too, you're basically running every zone from the beginning over and over and over again to get some wood, stone and iron to upgrade your town, 1 piece at a time, just over and over and over... all the same content, all the same enemies, over and over. Classes and skill feel meh at best, all feeling very much like any other. I tried every class except the ranger but combat, again felt very much the same no matter what you choose. The last one i tried was a warlock for a summoner build and oh boy, first grind your way up to level 10 to even unlock the summon, only to find out that you essentially have to be smacking mobs in melee range with a melee weapon, to generate charges to use on summoning minions, that have a built in life timer on them, dying 50 second after summoning the minion, regardless of the minions health. So Summoner kind of felt like a meme build at best, i absolutely despise Time to Live minion mechanics, unless it's built in to the spell it's self with no extra tedious steps in between (like smacking enemies in melee to build charges), like Raging Spirits in PoE 1 and PoE 2. The Character building is very very shallow, with very little to actually choose your self and very little impact on the choices you do get to make. Ironically the relics in the game that you find along each run, that gets deleted after the runs ends, are the most interesting part, at least in terms of actual choice and weight on the combat it's self. Which makes it all the more sad that the relics are indeed all deleted after every run, so you cant even adventure out to find hidden ones ect and make your build more interesting that way. All in all, the game feels very much like a shallow incremental Idle game, just with out the Idle part. And i cant really recommend it as it is.