izigame.me

Before purchasing, know that the publisher has abandoned this game. The developer is no longer authorized to patch or add content. A friend and I played the campaign via co-op on the second hardest difficulty with relatively no issues until a point where he'd crash during every stage transition (there are MANY of these). After searching the official Discord, we discovered this particular crash bug has been around for awhile and is caused by a unique item dropped by the giant spider boss. As long as that item exists in your game instance, certain players will perpetually crash. Discarding them on the floor is not enough. To fix: ALL players must sell ALL copies of that item to a vendor and wait a full 48 in-game hours for the shops to cycle inventory.
Hammerwatch 2 is like a modern incarnation of Gauntlet with quest progression, sandwiched inside a bland medieval fantasy shell. The colorful sprite aesthetic with visual damage numbers is a bit reminiscent of older 2D PSX titles and boasts high visual clarity, even at points when 20+ mobs of enemies are constantly chucking mini bullet hells. Five unique classes have 16 unique skills each which allow for varied build customization. I can't speak to the balancing of everything but I was able to work out a couple of serviceable and distinctive playstyles using the ranger. Convenient respecing makes it mostly painless to change builds to something better suited for late game if your initial choices don't pan out, that's always appreciated.
The story picks up immediately after the first game, which I didn't play, but I wonder now as I write this if there's an explanation to why the party starts out at level 1 when they just ran an entire prior adventure. Meet up with a resistance movement, kill a dragon, dethrone an illegitimate puppet ruler, defeat the necromancer mastermind. The game tells you exactly what's gonna happen and it unfolds with no surprises. Keep narrative expectations low as this isn't the kind of RPG that offers dynamic story consequences. Instead of cinematic set pieces, tension, or character development to encourage player investment, long winded exposition is vomited from forgettable NPCs I suspect were named with a random word generator.
There's a vast and dynamic open world advertised but it's really just one moderately sized hub area, a smaller second hub area, and a tiny starting island-- all peppered with generic caves which use the same exact tile set and inhabited by a single regional enemy type. Some caves contain a hidden random drop chest, some a side plot progression mechanic, but an alarming amount have seemingly no purpose but to maybe serve as an area to farm a bit of experience and materials for a crafting system you'll likely not utilize outside of side quests. I stopped actively picking up useless mushrooms and still had close to 1000 by end game. The vast majority of these caves feel like they were procedurally generated a single time, then given a playtest pass for functionality. Really, like a fire demon wolf cave could at least tint the screen red and have some wavy heat visual effects to differentiate itself from the other 20-30 caves. I initially thought the cordoned off regions of the world map's edge would open up, but at about 75% through the game it is clear those areas were meant for future DLCs that will never be. This makes the world feel too small for the scope the narrative pushes. For example: there's emphasis placed on travelling to a far desert for an important quest but it's just an empty screen of sand with a lone NPC chilling in his studio apartment pyramid with your fetch item. This is not an isolated incident and it really makes everything feel disappointingly small in a setting hyped up to be a sprawling adventure. The design in general inadvertently discourages exploring until a crucial hookshot traversal item unceremoniously drops from the main questline just before the halfway point of the game, as without it you're just missing too much.
There are a handful of main dungeons that were clearly handcrafted compared to the caves and those hold up a bit better, though some are very long winded time fillers like the sprawling cultist temple built by an architect with a hallway fetish and a 3+ floor troll cave complex with multiple entrances and exits. Of course it uses the generic cave tile set but at least there's some bone furniture feng shui. There's no equivalent of 'town portals' or convenient fast travel in the wilderness, so after completing a dungeon, it's necessary to manually backtrack all the way out which is an interesting design choice seeing as games from as far back as the ancient late 1900s solved this issue by adding an alternate exit at a dungeon's end or a one way shortcut back to the entrance. Enemy design is uninspired: three types of wolves, multiple palette swaps of three types of bugs, boars, three classes of troll, different flavors of undead (fresh or frozen), assorted human fodder in Halloween costumes, and for some reason, shamblers from Quake 1 (why?). The bosses all feel distinctive and are definitely the highlight of the game's combat, with the exception of the dragon which constantly cycles into an invincible flying state, making it the most tedious fight.
The day/night cycle curiously just serves to lock out any NPC the player needs to interact with from roughly 10:00PM to 10:00AM. Maybe for immersion? The music and lighting changes. Certain sidequests are on a timer or only unfold over time. Some randomly placed graveyards in the overworld will spawn undead enemies at night. That's all the differences I noticed. The feature feels very under cooked. Perhaps the devs could have given players a reason to fear travelling at night. Maybe introduce items or events that only appear during certain times of day. There's a main story NPC that jokes about you needing to return to him in specifically 10 hours after completing a task, as if the game is self aware that the mechanic is forced to justify its own existence.
I appreciate RPGs with co-op multiplayer because we all know there aren't enough out there, but I can't recommend this game in good faith as the setting has no soul, the exploration leaves much to be desired, and multiple game features are inconsequential (day/night cycle, most itemization outside of balancing resistances, crafting, cooking). The entire game feels like a proof of concept that wasn't properly fleshed out. Great sprite work and boss fights alone can't compensate for all that. I'm not trying to throw mad shade at a small dev team, you can tell there was love and sweat put into the title, but for a $25 asking price in a highly competitive market-- this did not stick the landing. Best of luck to the devs on their future Heroes of Hammerwatch 2 title.