Late to the Party: Hammerwatch

Price I paid: $1.43 (It was part of a seven game bundle on humblebundle.com)

Hammerwatch deserves the title “cooperative dungeon crawler” more so than any other game I have played. While I enjoy Diablo II, Champions of Norrath, and Dark Alliance, they tend to test the limits of how much I’m willing to forgive a person when my friend has 15,000 more gold than I have but refuses to help me buy new armor to protect my under-leveled behind that the enemies seem to love so much. Hammerwatch, thankfully, focuses on removing the unintentionally competitive aspects of the genre that don’t hamper the fun.

If you're clever, you can get out of situations like this, keep most of your blood, and reap the spoils of victory.

When a player picks up a gold coin in Hammerwatch, everyone gets a gold coin to spend however they wish. It makes risking getting your face pushed in by an enemy so you can be the one to snag the loot unnecessary. Little tweaks like that allow you to focus on helping your teammates and avoiding death. The gold will always be there when the blood has finish spilling.

Each class really does feel unique and offers different advantages. The paladin can get into and out of sticky situations with relative ease and belittle his teammates by making them look like they’re as frail as wet paper. The thief focuses on timing, being quick, and going off on his own because he is faster than everyone else. The priest is cripplingly codependent because he does little damage and can heal only his teammates at early levels. The warlock is a selfish prick who wants all the enemies to himself so he can syphon their power. The wizard burns everything with AOE fire spells that are just slow enough to keep him from getting the kills he wants. The Ranger has the longest range so he can do steady damage with a bow while using the rest of his team as meat shields.

The game shines its brightest with 2-4 players who have the ability to voice chat (Skype, Curse, whatever you fancy). I beat the game on single player (by cheating slightly), but it wasn’t as much fun by myself as it was playing with others, even when playing with strangers on the internet meant they would undoubtedly walk face first into a spike trap and take our last life. If you cannot find any friends to play with, my personal experience showed me games with friendly names yield nicer the people to play with. Games like “humblebundle noobs” and “come join us” resulted in pleasant people who were more concerned about having fun and working together than micromanaging the team.

A very Gauntlet inspired secret level. Old-school sound effects are included.

The main campaign is shortish, consisting of four areas and four bosses, though it may feel longer because an uncoordinated team results in countless deaths and thus forcing you to start over. However, the Temple of the Sun addition looks promising for adding more hours of gameplay, but I have yet to delve into that.

Unfortunately, there are very few character upgrades. The bare bones upgrade paths keeps the game at a fast pace, but it also only allows for a small amount of versatility. If you get enough gold, you’ll be upgrading everything, so it won’t really matter.

However, versatility isn’t the game’s selling point. Hammerwatch offers a fun, old-school style dungeon crawler that takes the best parts of classic games like Gauntlet and replaces the dated, clunky, and competitive pieces with new, slick, co-op based counter parts. If that sentenced interested you at all, then I would recommend joining the late bloomers and getting you and some friends to run and catch the Hammerwatch train.

- Jesse