Heroes of Hammerwatch

Boring game

very hard and slow progress

Fun at First, but Eventually Suffocated by Excessive Grinding Heroes of Hammerwatch is a fun and engaging game that can easily keep you hooked during its first few hours. The theme works very well, and the idea of having a town that you gradually develop by unlocking new buildings, upgrades, and permanent bonuses is easily one of the game’s strongest features. At first, the progression feels very satisfying. The maps are still interesting, the enemies have enough variety, and you genuinely feel your character becoming stronger after each run. The roguelite element works exactly as it should: even when an expedition ends badly, you still feel like you achieved something and will be better prepared next time. The problem begins once you unlock most of the upgrades that are relatively easy and cheap to obtain. From that point on, every new improvement requires absurdly larger amounts of gold and ore. Progress slows down dramatically, and the game starts pushing you into repeatedly replaying the same maps just to gather resources. To make matters worse, there is a fee for sending gold back to town—a tax as absurd as anything imposed by a socialist government. Ore is relatively easy to obtain, but the upgrades that require it also become increasingly expensive. Eventually, you reach a point where you no longer have the patience to replay the same maps from the beginning just to grind. The obvious solution is to use portals to reach the later areas more quickly. However, this often becomes even more frustrating, because your chances of surviving depend far too heavily on RNG and on whether the game decides to give you useful items during that run. Furthermore, if you use portals to reach the later areas more quickly, you miss out on much of the exploration content, which also means you farm ore and gold far less frequently. In other words, you do not progress properly and are forced to rely on luck to make it through all the remaining levels. After watching some streamers play, I realized that the game only seems truly manageable with less frustration in co-op. Multiplayer is less punishing in several ways, especially because players can help and revive each other. For that reason, I cannot recommend Heroes of Hammerwatch to anyone planning to play solo. Even for co-op players, I still find it difficult to recommend because of the excessive amount of grinding it demands, as though this were the only game on Earth and the player had nothing else to do with their time. It is a very good experience at first, but eventually becomes tedious once progression stops rewarding the player naturally and starts demanding excessive repetition.