Heroes of Hammerwatch – Ultimate Edition | Xbox One Review

I have a confession to make. Here at The Gaming Outsider, we take pride in our review process. One of the rules to which we try our hardest to adhere is finishing games before reviewing them. We want to be as thorough as possible when giving our honest opinions about the games we’ve played. It doesn’t feel fair to rate a game that we haven’t seen to completion. I broke that cardinal rule when I decided to review Heroes of Hammerwatch – Ultimate Edition from Stockhold developer Crackshell. On the surface, it looked like a game completely up my alley. I love roguelikes, after all. Unfortunately, this one falls directly into the “games that aren’t for me” category. I tried multiple times to get into it, and I just couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried. This was a game made for someone else that isn’t me; maybe that person is you. Let’s find out.

The Promise of Greatness

Heroes of Hammerwatch looks exactly like the type of game I would love. It offers procedurally-generated dungeons that are crafted quite well. You control your chosen character with an easy-to-navigate twin-stick shooter control scheme. As you navigate each dungeon, you collect gold and take out swarms of enemies a la Gauntlet. After each run, you use the gold you found to purchase upgrades for your character as well as the main hub world to make subsequent runs easier. It’s a recipe that sounds like the makings of a perfect game for me, so what went wrong?

There are certain aspects of a roguelike that have to be hit in order for me to consider it a quality experience. First off, I need to have moments of success early on in order to rope me into its loop. Heroes of Hammerwatch does quite the opposite. If you die inside a dungeon (which you will, considering it’s kind of a staple in the genre), you risk losing everything on that run. Sure, you’ve got the opportunity to send some gold back to your hub via a freight elevator. But this comes at a cost of a portion of your gold. Which means there’s always the possibility of making a completely wasted run. It drives me crazy when a game doesn’t respect my time.

Where Do I Go?

Secondly, there’s a severe lack of direction in this title. After I entered the hub world, I read instructions to enter a mine to begin my adventure. It took me several minutes of exploring and entering an area I wasn’t supposed to enter yet to find the mine. Granted, a lot of this is due to the game’s pixelated graphics, of which I don’t have any issues. I found this quite charming, actually. The frustration came with nothing being clearly marked. No waypoints. No signposts. Nothing.

Furthermore, doing any kind of upgrades is a complete chore. Each “shop” has no indication to remind you which is which. It seems like it would be an easy task to mark the weapon shop with a wooden sign showing a sword or something. My short memory keeps me from remembering which person provides which upgrades. If that weren’t enough, each upgrade costs a crazy amount of gold to unlock, making each run feel like a complete grind. Good roguelikes give you that shot of success to keep that carrot on a stick enticing throughout. Sadly, there was no carrot for me. I felt very little drive to keep pushing forward. So I stopped.

Choose your Adventurer

To the game’s credit, Heroes of Hammerwatch has an incredible amount of variety not seem in mosts games of this genre. From the beginning, you can choose from several different classes, each with its own unique mechanics. For me personally, however, this was very overwhelming. I had no idea which class would fit my play style. And I simply didn’t have the energy to start over with a different class to determine if one might be a better fit. I simply struggled to care.

I hate being so overly negative about a game that a team obviously put a ton of work into creating. There are some positives. The dungeon crawling is enjoyable, although some might be turned off by its methodical nature. Each enemy encounter must be taken very carefully and taken with a very defensive stance. You’ll spend a lot of time firing while walking backwards away from danger. Typical twin-stick shooter fare. Dungeons also have areas that require some very tricky navigation. These come complete with traps that are very interesting to work through, but they’re very risky, considering one wrong move could end your run instantly. Still, they’re a nice addition to the dungeons, especially since they’re not required for progression.

Heroes of Hammerwatch Final Verdict

I know I’ve been overly harsh on this game. I honestly don’t like talking down about a game as much as this, but I have to be honest when sharing my thoughts. There are a lot of things to appreciate in this game, but I’m simply not the one to do that. I’m sure there are people with much more patience than I that will find a lot to love in this title. I really wish that were the case for me, considering my love for the genre. But in a year where games like Undermine have perfected the roguelike formula, I’d rather stick to a game that follows the formula that works for me. Seriously, go play that game.

To hear me talk more about Heroes of Hammerwatch – Ultimate Edition, be sure to check out Episode 305 of The Gaming Outsider Podcast around the 1:08:02 time stamp.

This review is based on an Xbox One copy of Heroes of Hammerwatch – Ultimate Edition provided by BlitWorks for coverage purposes. It is also available on PlayStation 4 and Switch.