Luitenant_Gruber Hammerwatch II Review

Atrocious, Horrible Game, and one of the worst I played this year. I liked the first Hammerwatch game very much. It was a simple RPG with Retro graphics in which you collect coins, kill monsters, and progress to the next floor. Easy to understand, hard to master. Then, when I learned about Hammerwatch II, I got excited immediately. This excitement, however, was the biggest mistake I made this year and the slap in the face from this game left me crying on the floor. Hammerwatch II takes the Open World approach instead of the fixed levels from the first game. Although I still prefer the way the first game plays, I could respect the concept and was eager to explore and see what the game has to offer. The storyline picks up where the previous game left off, right when you slew the red Dragon. Now, some generic story about a Necromancer that captured the city of Adventurine (or whatever) takes place and you need to collect keys, break seals, kill the Blight, kill one more dragon that is not dead apparently, save the world and restore the king to the throne. This is nothing special, but I could roll with it. The soundtracks in this game are very good. Although short and on a loop, they give that nice RPG feel. I also liked the fact that the city soundtracks get quieter when it is nighttime. But here my friend, is where the praise ends, and the unspeakable atrocious gameplay and mechanics start. For starters, Graphics. Although nice and colorful, with nice animations, they constantly block your movement with ledges, rock formations in the background and perspective issues. This is extremely bad with the dense forest areas, where every tree gets you more stuck than a stepsister in a washing machine. Another major problem with the graphics is the purple fog and the rain weather effects. They mess up your screen and vision so incredibly bad, that you cannot see anything anymore and get a headache immediately. Then you got the endless dead ends. You walk in a cave, dead end. You go through forty miles of forest, dead end. You explore a massive cave, dead end. You also got a trillion treasure chests, valuables and items that are resting on impossible to reach ledges, little islands or on some high rock. No exit or path in sight, no secret wall, no button or switch, nothing. At first, I thought that you would get some flying ability later on, but no, they are just for decoration. The controls and interfaces are overly complicated. You need to bind a skill via the Skill menu, press a key and then use the skill. The first time I was looking up online how I could finally dig a hole after obtaining the shovel. The interaction with merchants and objects is also broken. Sometimes, you need to moonwalk ten steps back and then forth to reactivate dialog or an interface. I really, really, really hated the day and night cycles. You can never finish a quest because everyone is in their bed, and you need to wait eight hours in game for their lazy bums to return to their post. You need to watch this in real time, where some merchants slowly wobble back to their stupid shop ten thousand miles away, the same goes for sailors to bring you to other parts of the map. You need to go to an inn, pay money, select the amounts of hours to sleep and repeat. The absolute worst ones are the million Quest Givers that say, “Hey bro, come back in a few hours haha”. If you are in some stupid cave a million miles deep into the bowels of the earth, you need to walk back to the nearest village, sleep 3 hours and walk the whole way back to Mordor. The final quest is the prime example of this. The King Rejoices, everyone is happy, but no, he can only award you and make the game end after “a few hours”. Speaking of Quests, they are broken beyond belief. You finish a quest, and then it is back in your log, as if nothing happened. When you reach the original Quest giver, you must talk to him, and the quest is suddenly solved. Then you got the ones that have an invisible timer. You find a cave in the mountains, a quarter of a million miles away, and three soldiers are hurt. They ask, “Hey bro, heal us lol haha” and you don’t have a Remedy Potion or three Large Healing Potions. You search far and wide for the 1% drop chance for Glass Bottles, the only way to acquire them, and when you come back, they are all dead, and you fail. And that brings me to the worst problem of them all: No Town Portals, no Checkpoints, no Fast Travel. In this open world game, you walk as slow as a eighty-year-old snail that has constipation and is going up on a downwards escalator. You need to walk millions and millions of miles in this game, but there is nothing. No Teleporters, no Town Portal, nothing. You find yourself in some Troll cave a few billion light years away from civilization and realize that you need some key or item that you don’t have. Then the dread kicks in in which you realize that you need to walk all-the-freaking-way-back. It made me cry in agony. Another thing that enraged me but also made me laugh in desperation, is the mini puzzle game in which you need to press buttons in a specific order for a reward. I focused and tried to push the buttons in the correct order, but then, my wolf stepped on another apparently and it counted as a button press, and I failed. Oh my… And that brings me to the last issue of this game. Exploration is not tolerated or rewarded. Instead, it is being punished. You have a specific spot in the Trollolol cave where you can jump down from some tiny ledge. If you do not have the Quest active to proceed further in this cave, you are done. You are in Limbo. If you do not use the console to end your own existence and respawn in town, your save is done for. The only thing you hear is the developer laughing at your face and stuffing his finger far down your throat. In the end, I hated Hammerwatch II with every fiber in my body. I am a pathetic being and wanted all achievements, but I unlocked them without pride, accomplishment or satisfaction. Instead, I was crying in agony and suffering with every step. Stay far, far away from this horrible game.