Heroes of Hammerwatch – Ultimate Edition Review: Gold Digger

As I grow older, I gain more and more of an appreciation for the roguelike as a genre. Between trying to maintain a social life, family responsibilities, taking care of a house, working a normal job, and contributing to this site, I have a lot on my plate, and the option to sit down for just a few minutes in short spurts to make a daily run or simply zone out and stare at something that requires little thought process is a major godsend. Most of these games simply challenge you to build up a character for a single run, get as far as you can, die, and start the process over from scratch on your next try, but Heroes of Hammerwatch – Ultimate Edition opts to play the long game.

From the start this can be a little overwhelming, as you select one of the five unlocked classes and venture into the town simply named The Outlook, which is suffering from an infestation of epic proportions in its mine. The village is in need of someone to go in solo (or with an online friend… if the game lets you) to rid the world of bug armies and the like, which makes the action feel like a medieval Starship Troopers. Not only do the townsfolk lack the ability to defend themselves, but they also seem a bit lazy since they ask you to go mine gold and ore to upgrade their little space in the world as well.

Unlike most roguelikes, you’re not just trying to seek out treasure rooms to find buffs and better weapons – while these are occasionally found in chests, your main goals are surviving and collecting as much of the precious materials as possible, dropping them off into a mine cart, and moving on to the next floor until you reach the conclusion of the run or fall victim to one of the many forms of insects that attack you with vicious tenacity. Upon death, you’ll lose any gold or ore that you were holding that wasn’t returned to the town, but retain your items and XP. This was a welcome change that lead to my skill and the difficulty of the game converging after a few runs, where it never felt too difficult or too easy. If I started to experience some issues progressing, the next upgrade was never too far out of reach, thus leveling the playfield.

The game plays like a traditional twin-stick shooter with the incorporation of unique character abilities that drain mana. Each class has its own weapon of choice as well as the ability to keep the action fresh and exciting, in addition to a decent level cap of 20. I sampled each of the opening classes with a run or two but quickly gravitated to the rogue class, opting for the long-range bow and flourish of arrows that is a unique ability that clears difficult rooms quickly. One of the biggest changes to the standard formula is each area is its own floor filled with winding pathways that zig and zag, with a fully fleshed out map (without a proper key that easily deciphers what each icon is) that removes the mystery of what is behind each door. The end result is something that was more reminiscent of a SNES version of Diablo than The Binding of Isaac. 

The one area that really nagged me throughout my time with this game was how much dead space is used on-screen at any given time. In most of the locales visited, the edges of the map, the thick walls creating the pathways, or just outright blackness dominated my large display. Additionally, the slightly skewed top-down viewpoint makes it extremely easy to miss lone enemies sneaking up behind you as their faint shadow is shown in a dark red tone against the dark backdrops that is easy to miss, especially when it’s one of the smaller enemies that only take up the space of a handful of pixels. Aside from these minor visual issues, the game succeeds at conveying a retro look and feel that is a joy to play, despite being a little grind heavy. As I mentioned previously, the upgrades come often, but it’s not always the one you want since there are 3 main currencies used to purchase the upgrades (one of which is used for pets that I have yet to find any of), as well as the XP pool that you can drop points into to select perks and upgrades.

As of this writing, the biggest miss is the lack of couch co-op, and while you can play the game online, it’s not really optimized for it. I attempted on multiple occasions to venture out with my wife and child via the online play and experienced connectivity issues even within the same home. I went as far as running ethernet cables across my home to each system and still could not connect, even when having no issues playing other games together with the same setup.

Despite its online issues and some minor design choices, Heroes of Hammerwatch – Ultimate Edition is a solid roguelike that can offer hours of randomized gameplay thanks to the number of classes, upgrades, and standout gameplay loop. I look forward to (hopefully) getting an update to correct the network issues or the inclusion of a split-screen mode, but until then I will continue to venture deep within the mines solo.

8 out of 10

Pros

  • Large Cast of Playable Classes
  • Fun Gameplay Loop, Great for Short Gaming Sessions
  • Unique Roguelike Mechanics

Cons

  • Online Play is Broken
  • No Local Co-Op
  • Some Strange Design Choices
  • Too Much Dead Space Visually

Heroes of Hammerwatch – Ultimate Edition was developed by Crackshell and published by BlitWorks. It launched on NS and X1. The game was provided to us for review on X1. If you’d like to see more of Heroes of Hammerwatch – Ultimate Edition, check out the publisher’s site.

 

Here at GBG we use a rating method that you are more than likely familiar with – a scale of 1 to 10. For clarification, we intend on using the entire scale: 1-4 is something you should probably avoid paying for; 5-7 is something that is worth playing, but probably not at full price; 8-10 is a great title that you can feel confident about buying. If you have any questions or comments about how we rate a game, please let us know.

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