Hammerwatch II Review (PlayStation 4)

Hammerwatch II is a game that offers decent pixel art graphics and a download size of 1.23GB. It’s compatible with Playstation 5 and offers a platinum trophy for achievement hunters. The game provides a variety of graphics settings including Xray, color grading, brightness, gamma, contrast, CRT curve, post phosphor, and post dot and bloom.

The game settings are extensive, allowing customization of various aspects such as overlay minimap alpha, enemy health bars, ally health bar, auto equip, instanced loot, aim guide, tutorials, movement direction snap, aim direction snap, movement direction dash, floating texts, remote damage numbers, local damage numbers, always show Hud overlay, enable loot log, enable amount, Looter, and minimum quality to display.

Hammerwatch II supports both online and offline play. It offers two modes of play – original mode, and persistent mode. The original mode is locked and can only be used on a run whereas the persistent mode lets you keep and use your save in all modes on and offline. Before starting a game, switches can be turned on and off for features like rare health regent, extra regent, extra damage, and equipment loss on death. The game offers four difficulties – Easy, normal, hard, and serious, and provides eight save slots.

The character creator is detailed, allowing customization of name, hair, eyes, nose, mouth, voice, skin, hair, hat, robe, cape, book (changes on your class type), and class – Wizard, Ranger, Warlock, Rogue, and Paladin. The gameplay is ARPG style, with tutorial pop-ups as you play. Cutscenes are a mix of in-game interactions and still screens with text.

The game world is visually appealing with good-looking locations and breakable objects scattered throughout. The controls feel a lot like a twin-stick shooter especially if you have ranged weapons and spells. You can take on optional side quests from NPCs in the world. Your book menu details all your stats, inventory, level-ups, and quests. The map uncovers as you explore.

The game offers a radial dial to quickly use items, skills, and menu. You earn exp and level up to get your health and mana restored and attribute points into the skill trees. In solo offline play, you can pause the game. You can save when you want but it does have a generous autosave system. The game features massive boss battles and plays a lot better in multiplayer.

However, the game has its drawbacks. The menu is driven by the right stick being a mouse cursor which is not always ideal. You cannot change the camera distance or anything. The color can make it hard to make out enemies or players. As soon as you hit a town or village the game frame rate tanks and slows it all down and is not fun. The tutorial pop-ups don’t cover a lot of the game mechanics or even lay out the controls clearly. You cannot remap controls. So much is going on like map overlays, enemies, etc that it is really hard to see what is what. You can easily get overwhelmed by the many side quests. The game is very slow-paced and the opening hour is slow. It plays like the last game but has a ton more extra stuff on top like quests etc making it voluminous and suffocating at times. Despite these issues, Hammerwatch II offers a familiar experience to the last game. If you liked the last game then it’s that but with a bit more on top, more content but not more innovation or progression.