Crackshell has been working for a long time on Hammerwatch II and the game runs on a different engine than the original game. The first thing you’ll notice is significantly increased visual details from the original game. You start out as one of the generic heroes (just like the first game) and you’ve just defeated the red dragon in Castle Hammerwatch. Now it’s time to pack it in and head back to base. In the previous game, you never left the castle but things are a lot more open in Hammerwatch II and this is a very different experience all around. Instead of a semi-arcade game, you’re treated to an open-world RPG interpretation of Hammerwatch where you have to complete quests, help citizens, clear dungeons, and explore. Blight the Horrible hasn’t been killed and it’s up to you to put King Roland back on the throne. Right now though, he’s in a sewer in a nearby city and that’s where you’ll stage your explorations from once you get there.
There’s definitely a learning curve to Hammerwatch II. Since the game is more open, the developers realized you’d need a bit of familiarization with the new setup so the island around Castle Hammerwatch is your introduction to the game with a few smaller levels full of enemies and a pirate’s den that you’ll have to fight through in order to progress to the main game. That may take longer than you think though because the difficulty in Hammerwatch II is a fair bit more inconsistent than the first game and walking into the wrong area without slowly levelling up is going to get you killed fast. Fortunately the life system has been eliminated in this sequel and if you die, you’ll simply lose a percentage of your gold. The downside to this is that you die a lot and much like our real economy, everything costs way too much, leaving players scrounging for enough coin to upgrade slightly and constantly underpowered, especially in the beginning of the game.
What you’ll soon find out is that you’ll be wandering around a lot in Hammerwatch II. Sure, there are quests, but unlike most games of this type, there are no markers of any kind and you’ll have to pay close attention to what the various NPCs have to say in order to figure out where to go and what to do. Nothing is labeled on maps other than with symbols representing interaction points so you generally don’t know where to go and have to explore fairly thoroughly in order to figure out what comes next and where the locations you’re looking for are. This leads to frustration fairly quickly when you’re given a bevy of quests outside of the castle but no reference points as to where to actually complete them.
Eventually you’ll develop a rhythm of exploration punctuated by returns to town to upgrade your weapons and armor and refill your potions. Utilizing the overlay map will show you areas you can enter once you’ve discovered them and labels vendors, inns, and other useful areas. Unfortunately there are no labels on the map so you’re forced to remember where you need to go in order to find the right items, equipment, and training for your needs. Any decent equipment is pricey though, meaning that you’ll be grinding a lot in order to facilitate any meaningful purchases. Due to the revised life system, you’re not stockpiling lives anymore but instead lose a percentage of your gold (usually 15-20%), making it even more difficult to save up cash when skill upgrades and items cost 1000 gold or more and you’re picking up gold at an average rate of 1-5 gold per drop. Making it out to survive long enough to go spend that gold is certainly a challenge but no one said Hammerwatch II lacked for challenge.
Once you’ve beaten a couple of bosses and fought your way through a few dungeons, you’ll have leveled up a few times as well. This makes your attacks more powerful depending on where you distribute skill points and you can do some actual damage to some of the enemies. The larval enemies from the first game are back and they’re harder than the first time around. The same goes for the beetles you’ll have to fight early on which swarm you and now hit with flame attacks as well. In general, expect that anything you fought in the first game is tougher and has stronger attacks, making survival perilous at best. Hammerwatch II is noticeably more challenging than the first game, even with the ability to walk more quickly while attacking at the same time, certainly a useful upgrade. Ranged attacks are more effective in the game as well and dropping bombs and firing arrows is better than getting close in used to be because enemy movement patterns and attacks have certainly changed. The ranger and the rogue in particular are useful characters once they’ve leveled up a bit due to their range and bomb attacks respectively.
By now you’ve got an idea that Hammerwatch II is a gruelling challenge that requires time and patience both within levels and to progress as well. That in itself isn’t a bad thing however. You also have the option to add modifications to the difficulty in the start menu when you begin a new game. You can choose from any of four difficulties and then optionally mod those difficulties by adding rules that allow health and mana to regenerate or make the game more difficult by strengthening enemies or limiting health items. There are plenty of options available but even with modification, Hammerwatch II is surprisingly tough.
That’s not just because of the difficulty though. The game also has some technical glitches that have not been ironed out for the Nintendo Switch. First and foremost is the motion blur inherent in the engine used for Hammerwatch II. When you walk your character doesn’t blur but the entirety of the background slightly blurs until you stop moving. This makes it hard to figure out exactly where you are at any given time and easy to lose track of what’s on screen. The original Hammerwatch does not have this issue and all visuals stay sharp and clear at all times during gameplay. Enemies also respawn after a certain amount of time or after a certain number of deaths (which also eat up in-game hours). This means that when you’re struggling to survive a particularly tough level and keep dying, your progress essentially vanishes over time and you’ll have to fight your way back through the same enemies all over again, leading to even more gold loss and frustration.
Then there’s the UI. Hammerwatch II is clearly designed for PC and it shows when trying to play on the Switch. Simply trying to utilize items can be difficult and moving items around to sell them is remarkably irritating. This also goes for actually trying to use things that you find, to the point that you just don’t bother because the vast majority of the menu system is wildly unintuitive. Simple things like using points to upgrade or finding specific notes in the menu system are too complex and vague. If you had a mouse, chances are none of this would be a problem, but with a Switch controller, it’s almost like there’s an extra layer of difficulty hovering along the outskirts of Hammerwatch II making things far more work than they need to be. Load times are also surprisingly long between areas for a game that on the surface doesn’t look all that impressive. As frustrating as these issues are, they’re far from the worst problem Hammerwatch suffers from. That is incontestably software failures.
Hammerwatch II crashes…a lot. There has already been an update patch since the writing of this review but even so, the game still crashes on almost every playthrough. Luckily it also autosaves when you leave or enter an area so sometimes you won’t lose as much progress but going to save and having the game boot you out to the Switch home screen is beyond frustrating. This can happen mid-combat, when loading new areas, or even just at random. Nearly every session we played resulted in at least one fatal game crash. That’s not a solid track record and many players will just give up after multiple crashes from a game that’s challenging to begin with. For a game that’s been out since June to crash this much, Switch port optimization is likely not the best and if you add that to the laundry list of other issues, it slowly pulls Hammerwatch II’s potential down significantly farther than it should be.
Hammerwatch II has a lot of potential with an open-world mission-based approach to the original formula of the game. It’s clear that the developers struggled to find a way to streamline that design effectively though, leading to pacing issues, technical issues with the updated engine, and a frustrating UI that all end up holding back the game. It’s certainly possible that many of these problems could be fixed with patches but as things currently stand, they have not been solved. That leaves Hammerwatch II as something of a compromised game that could be fun in the right circumstances but likely only appeals to a particularly masochistic and patient player type at the moment. If that’s you, you’re probbalyh already rubbing your hands together with glee but for the rest of us, it might be worth waiting to see if things get fixed before spending $25 on Hammerwatch II right now. It’s a cool concept but the execution certainly leaves something to be desired.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.
[…] publisher Modus Games have managed to not only port the recently released Hammerwatch II (review here) to the Switch but have also thoughtfully released the Anniversary Edition of the original game as […]