Hammerwatch II Review (PlayStation 4)

by Jim Smale · April 26, 2024

Hammerwatch II Review, Gather your heroes and journey beyond the dungeons of Castle Hammerwatch to explore a pixelated world like never before. Aid King Roland’s resistance while helping villagers along the way. Battle beasts, finish off hordes of the undead, and face the forces of evil.

Hammerwatch II Review Pros:

Decent pixel art graphics.
1.23GB download size.
Platinum trophy.
Works on Playstation 5.
Graphics settings – Xray, color grading, brightness, gamma, contrast, CRT curve, post phosphor, and post dot and bloom.
Game settings – 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.
Online amd offline play.
Two ways to play – original mode, and persistent mode.
It comes down to original mode is locked and can only be used on a run whereas the persistent mode let’s you keep and use your save in all modes on and offline.
Switches can be turned on and off before a game – rare health regent, extra regent, extra damage, and equipment loss on death.
Four difficulties – Easy, normal, hard and serious.
Eight save slots.
Character creator – 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.
ARPG gameplay.
Tutorial pop ups as you play.
Cutscenes are a mix of in-game interactions and still screens with text.
Handy respawn button.
Good looking locations.
The controls feel a lot like a twin stick shooter especially if you have ranged weapons and spells.
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.
Breakable objects covering the game world.
Radial dial to quickly use items, skills, and menu.
Earn exp and level up to get your health and man restored and attribute points into the skill trees.
In solo offline play you can pause the game.
Save when you want but it does have a generous autosave system.
Massive boss battles.
Plays a lot better in multiplayer.

Hammerwatch II Review Cons:

The menu is driven by the right stick being a mouse cursor which is not always ideal.
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.
Cannot remap controls.
So much is going on like map overlays, enemies, etc that it is really hard to see what is what.
Can easily get overwhelmed by the many side quests.
Very slow-paced game 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.