Heroes of Hammerwatch II

What I don’t like about Heroes of Hammerwatch II

Persistent gear makes every character more work

The biggest change from the first game is the emphasis on persistent equipment, and I don’t think it makes Heroes of Hammerwatch II that much better. This is already a game that wants me to level every class, repeat the campaign through multiple New Game Plus levels, buy character upgrades, and keep spending gold. Adding weapons and armor means I also need to find gear for every character, compare it, pay to specialize it, and potentially maintain different setups if I switch between weapon-focused and skill-focused builds.

That becomes another huge gold sink multiplied across seven, eight, nine, or however many classes eventually exist. If I come back to a class I haven’t used in a while, I may not remember where I left its progression. If I don’t have gold, I need to grind some before the character feels ready. I don’t mind grindy games, but there is a difference between a 20 or 30-hour grind and a 100 or 200-hour commitment before I feel like I have really gone through a game.

The first Heroes of Hammerwatch felt like leveling other characters could lift a struggling class enough that I really noticed it. Here, that same roster progression exists, but gear carries so much of the load that leveling everyone doesn’t seem to bring the same payoff. I can raise another character for its global bonus, return to the one I was struggling with, and still need to farm the right equipment. Then I need money to turn that equipment into the build I want. It is just a lot more.

Epic gear adds another loop beside the good loop

Players wanted rarities beyond the blue gear that existed around launch, and the game eventually added Epic armor and weapons. I expected purple or gold gear in a loot game too, so seeing it arrive should have been exciting. The way it arrives is the problem.

Bosses can drop maps that lead to separate, leveled missions, and those missions reward Epic equipment and the material used to improve it. So I play the main game to find a map, then leave the main loop to run a separate mission, then repeat that process while trying to outfit every class. If I had unlimited time, maybe I wouldn’t care. I don’t have unlimited time, and there are a lot of other games I want to play.

I would have rather seen that effort go into the in-run trinkets. Let me find a trinket blueprint, find duplicates, and slowly strengthen the original effect. It could even have an effectively endless progression where the right random drop stays exciting. That would add grind to the part I already enjoy instead of adding another equipment checklist outside it.

Too many trinkets stop mattering

The trinket scaling might be the biggest sin in the game. Finding them during a run should create the excitement and build variety that keeps a roguelite moving, but many effects don’t scale far enough. A trinket that deals a fixed amount of damage might be useful early, then my normal attacks grow so far beyond it that I stop caring when it drops.

They don’t all become meaningless, but too many do. Once those discoveries stop being fun, the random part of a run loses something. Heroes of Hammerwatch II keeps scaling enemy health and asking me to optimize more aggressively, while a bunch of the toys I find along the way stay behind. That feels backwards.

New Game Plus narrows the builds

I haven’t pushed as far as some players, and balance has changed across a lot of patches, so I don’t want to pretend this is a perfect breakdown of the current meta. Earlier in the game’s life, magic users and classes that could heal themselves felt much stronger to me. The Warlock could keep healing through one of its abilities, and another magic build could heal from critical hits, which made burning through the first New Game Plus levels easier.

Eventually enemy health keeps rising, resistance penalties hurt, and player defense doesn’t seem to catch up the way offense does. The answer becomes killing everything before it kills you. I had to find something broken, focus almost everything on the strongest offensive part of a specialization, or learn every pattern well enough to avoid getting hit. The classes may look varied, but the endgame solution can start feeling the same.

Some normal enemies and traps can be more dangerous than the bosses. I also found myself standing in an empty room waiting to regenerate because I didn’t want to spend a potion before the boss. That is technically a choice, I guess, but staring at an empty room isn’t a great part of the core fantasy.

Patches have also broken or weakened things people were using. I would rather see weaker classes and builds brought up, especially in a game with endlessly rising New Game Plus health, than have the fun options knocked down over and over. Maybe that makes the game less perfectly balanced. I think this is the kind of game where letting more things become powerful would be better.

Co-op progression still feels awkward

I don’t know why multiplayer progression still works this way in so many games. The host’s town is the one everybody uses and advances, so the group naturally asks who has played the most and joins that person. Then everyone returns to their own town later and doesn’t have the same upgrades or progression waiting for them.

I would rather manage my private town, handle whatever upgrades I need, and then meet the group in some shared town square where quests and relevant progression apply to everybody. The current system isn’t enough to ruin co-op, but it creates a little administrative mess around the best part of the game. Everyone should get the progress that makes sense without having to leave, return home, and work out what their own town missed.

The town itself creates similar friction. It is cool to walk through at first, but eventually I am running all the way to the bottom for one upgrade and then all the way to the top-right for something else. Give me an optional menu or a way to jump between services. I have already seen the town. Making me jog across it for the hundredth time isn’t adding much.

The levels and secrets lost some personality

The levels are a mixed bag. The first couple are fine, there are one or two in the middle that I barely remember, and the final area is okay. The Celestial Ruins is my least favorite addition so far. There is too much happening visually, and I have a hard time reading what is going on.

Secret hunting also felt better in the original. Different biomes taught us to notice different things, like blinking eyes in a cave, a strange block, or a button hidden in the environment. I distinctly remember the group realizing there were secrets at all, then everybody running around trying to learn what each area was asking us to find.

In Heroes of Hammerwatch II, secrets mostly mean looking for cracks and attacking walls. It is easier to understand, and after a while I know where most of them are likely to be, but it isn’t as memorable. The first game made the environments part of learning how to search. The sequel makes me shoot the walls.

Both games also lose me a little when later content starts splitting away from the core campaign. The original had things like the arena and desert content, while the sequel now has map missions and The Celestial Ruins. Some of those offshoots are interesting, but I mostly want more reasons to repeat and deepen the main loop.

Skipping was better in the first game

The first game handled repeat content with arena-like fights that simulated moving through earlier levels and still handed out a useful batch of items. Skipping content I had already cleared felt like another piece of the game rather than a button that removed part of it.

Skipping in Heroes of Hammerwatch II isn’t nearly as fun. When I play with other people, we hardly use it unless we are literally carrying somebody through early progression. That is a problem in a game built around taking every character through content repeatedly. If the game expects that much repetition, its shortcut should feel good.

The quality-of-life problems add up

I really want per-character controls. Some classes have an ability I want mapped to a directional input so it can fire constantly without me repeatedly pressing another button. Then I switch characters, the important skills sit in different slots or work differently, and I need to change everything again. By the time I return, I have forgotten the old layout and have to rebuild it.

Saving bindings for each character would remove a ridiculous amount of friction for how small the feature sounds. The controls themselves are good. The game just refuses to remember that I don’t want every class arranged the same way.

I also couldn’t get co-op to work reliably on my Steam Deck. Every attempt crashed me out. That may not happen to everyone and patches may change it, but it removed what should have been a great way for me to keep playing with friends.

The presentation works without sticking with me

The pixel art, effects, and speed all work. Once the screen gets busy and a character has multiple dashes, the game looks and feels alive. The music is okay too. It isn’t bad, but there is nothing in the soundtrack I would listen to outside the game or remember as one of those classic themes that hits hard the second it starts.

Maybe stronger music would make the whole thing land differently for me. I don’t know. Audio can carry a lot of personality in a game like this, and here it mostly exists without becoming part of why I remember it.