Hammerwatch II Review (Nahiatsu)
I thoroughly enjoyed this game when I played it, but I say this lovingly:
I would never recommend this game to my friends. This game has persistent crashes, bugs and totally unreliable instances of game play. The game crashed near hourly and had tons of various lag issues. (Example: Large piles of gold can cause serious lag/sound issues/crashes) Considering this game is not a high graphic output game, there is no excuse for the poor optimization and performance at all. The very obvious lack of any developer communications to the player base is alarming and the lack of updates to this game to resolve the never-ending list of bugs and crashes is unacceptable.
For all the faults and frustrations I had while playing the game, I did enjoy the action and character building in game. I love that the mod community also enjoys working to expand the game and the features within. I purchased the game because I'm a sucker for the graphic style and RPG elements that it really DOES do well. It was kind of my alternative dungeon crawler game for a while. The game's music kept me floating along as well, it's catchy and pretty enjoyable overall.
Some games are brilliant. Some games will fall flat on their face for not resonating well with the target audience. There are some games that are cult classics because they have a very loyal base, but at the end of the day if you can't be bothered to follow up and improve the game to be able to continuously run -AT A MINIMUM-, your game should be nothing but "refunded".
I would give this game a score of 27/100. (I don't have a real metric, I just felt the game was only able to run for a 4th of my playtime) The game could be both brilliant and resilient if it could manage to stay launched for more than 30 minutes to an hour at a time. It has many great concepts and a ton of wonderful community members that want to add content and enjoyment to the game for others to experience, and I find that when a community is willing to do that it can become a masterpiece.
This game will never become anything like that without the support of the creator to finish what they started so it can be enjoyed without the constant pressure of frustration and disappointment.