Mento's May Mastery '16: Day Twenty-Four: Hammerwatch

Hammerwatch

Crackshell's 2013 dungeon-crawler Hammerwatch appears to be another game like Cargo Commander in that I'm pleasantly surprised by how much I'm enjoying the game, having somehow misrepresented what it was on first glance. Ironically, while Cargo Commander was an action game that turned out to be a more rules-complex roguelite, Hammerwatch is practically the opposite: while it superficially ticks all the requisites for a game of the abundant Indie roguelike dungeon crawler sub-genre - it has a top-down perspective, has huge dungeons built in a seemingly chaotic and random manner and has a perma-death of sorts - it's actually joins a small but growing number of nostalgic throwbacks in being a deliberate and faithful recreation of a much older style of game. In Hammerwatch's case specifically, that older game is Atari's 1985 formative quarter-muncher Gauntlet. While Hammerwatch does encourage and reward exploration, the core of the gameplay is in fighting enormous hordes of rambling creatures, and in finding ways to control those crowds and retreating before you can be swarmed. Playing as the Ranger class, the game's also taken on the mantle of a dual-stick shooter where I'm often having to run around with the strafe button held down, kiting a giant bunch of enemies while looking for a way to get past them and destroy the monster spawners beyond.

Eep! Bats, like most minor enemies, aren't so much a problem but for the fact that they can swarm you quickly with their speed and numbers.

While it probably moves way too slowly for a dual-stick shooter fanatic, Hammerwatch has managed to pull off what Gauntlet did those three decades plus ago: it has created a traditional dungeon-crawler that is palatable to a player of a more action-oriented persuasion, without necessarily removing the core elements - finding secrets, collecting loot, upgrading your stats and skills - that made dungeon-crawlers appealing in the first place. You still press suspicious buttons to open walls, or destroy barrels for the handfuls of gold coins within, or avoid traps by getting their timing down. The classic RPG experience is there, but you're also throwing yourself into giant throngs of enemies and whittling them down through grit and grace.

I also like the look of the game. It's an aesthetic that's built around the macro, the bigger picture, with wonderfully detailed but zoomed out environments that helps to emphasize, as well as lets the player see coming, the huge crowds of enemies you'll be facing on the reg. I like the little top-down sprites of the characters and humanoid enemies too; they have a distinct "Sensible Slasher" vibe to them. The music's catchy as well, which is almost a necessity given the game's size and the length of time you'll spend on each of its dungeon floors. Hammerwatch appears to be a pretty big game, though perhaps somewhere in the median in terms of RPG lengths in general. Each of its floors takes close to an hour to explore, as you work your way through the hundred or so monsters in every room before sweeping them for treasure and secrets before moving onto the next wide-open area. There's no experience in the game, and no equipment to speak of: instead, every power-up comes courtesy of the game's many vendors. These vendors can be as well-hidden as the treasure itself, and each has a specialization. For instance, an Offense vendor will sell you damage upgrades and the power to critically hit once every ten arrows, while a Vitality vendor will offer boosts to health, mana and movement speed. And then there's the combo system.

I'm all purpley with combo power. Even so, I don't imagine it'll be enough for that room over there...

The combo system, which also has its own vendor for specialized upgrades, provides a key element to the game's room-clearing strategies. By building a chain of enemy kills within short succession, the player momentarily turns purple and acquires a number of different boosts depending on what combo upgrades the player has purchased. Initially, they can move and attack slightly faster, but soon enough they'll be firing off spreadshots in every direction and regenerating health for as long as they can keep the combo chain going. It can be a powerful life-saver, but buying the necessary upgrades to make this ability truly useful means diverting funds away from always-effective passive upgrades like permanent health boosts to invest in what is, after all, a very temporary state of incredible power. The game is generous with its gold pieces, especially to those with a sharp eye for secrets, but the upgrades themselves aren't exactly cheap either. You soon learn to prioritize with what funds you have.

I'm on the second of the game's "act" as of writing, having defeated the first boss, and despite the slow speed of the game's progress I'm having a ball. The game has some classic dungeon crawler features, like multi-floor puzzles and spikes that need to be deactivated before you can go near them, and I'm only slightly apprehensive about the fact that the game gives you a finite number of lives, with more to be found in well-hidden caches. I'm at what I assume is a fairly indestructible 20 extra lives having died only once exploring the dungeon and twice on that first boss (that fight gets very nasty very quick), yet there's always the worry that I'll whittle them all away on dumb errors and be faced with starting over after getting some ten hours of progress into this colossal dungeon. I suspect if that happens, I won't be returning to the game, even with all the other classes left to try. It'll be the end or bust tomorrow - or maybe Wednesday, depending on just how big this game turns out to be. Either way, I'm into it.

Sure seems to be a lot of modern throwbacks with silly homage bonus stages to their ancient inspirations around at the moment.

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