Hammerwatch II Preview

Hammerwatch II is a pixelated top-down hack-and-slash action RPG developed by Crackshell and published by Modus Games. In it, you'll explore an open world set in medieval times, where you'll go on a journey — alone or with up to three friends — to aid King Roland's resistance against hordes of evil undead.

The game starts off with a brief explanation of how Blight — an evil necromancer — succeeded in his ploy to overthrow the king and bring chaos to the land. After the beginning sequence ends, you get to create your own hero by choosing their class and looks. Whilst there's a nice variety in the classes available, with a total of five options to pick from — Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Wizard, and Warlock — the physical customisation is a bit lacking; it's not really that important, as you'll barely ever see their face, but it's still worth mentioning as it's classified as a roleplaying title.

Once you're done creating your character, the game starts off after you've canonically defeated the dragon that was attacking the city in the story. Although the main questline is locked in the demo, I got a decent feel for the gameplay from the few sidequests available.

The game plays a lot like Skyrim or most MMORPGs, where you explore different areas, get missions from NPCs, and clear dungeons for loot, such as gear and crafting materials. That being said, unlike most open-world titles where the sheer amount of dialogue might put some players off, Hammerwatch II adds a nuanced option to choose whether you want the NPC to elaborate in more in-depth and roleplay-like text or make it short and sweet. This allows you to keep the gameplay action-heavy without feeling like you missed out on any context because you skipped or skimmed quest logs.

Whilst I appreciated the variety in missions, as you go from helping a little girl find her toy and ridding a shop owner of pests to diving deep into dungeons trying to recover stolen items, you'll still spend most of your time infiltrating into caves and enemy dens. Although this isn’t a problem in and of itself, I did find it a bit difficult to tell when a group of enemies was higher level without having to test the waters and risk getting basically one-shot, causing me to lose chunks of my money repeatedly. 

Despite all of this, I really enjoyed Hammerwatch II's combat — it's challenging enough that it doesn't feel brainless but not so complex that it became complicated, and the classes I tried (the Wizard, Rogue, and Paladin) felt different enough, bringing some novelty to each run.

This brings me to two other systems that follow the MMORPG pattern: crafting and skills. As you defeat enemies, you'll gain XP and level up, which allows you to allocate points to your stats (such as Health and Dexterity) and also opens up the opportunity to train with one of the NPCs to gain access to even more abilities. Similarly, looting fallen foes will net you tons of crafting resources and gear to help you stay afloat against the harder enemies.

Although the preview only let me experience the starting area, Hammerwatch II has already shown a lot of its potential with gameplay elements. Various characters and classes with fun combat will only be better with multiplayer, and I can’t wait until I can escape the beginning island and try out more of what the game has to offer!