I’m shocked I haven’t raved about Heroes of Hammerwatch (HoH) on this blog before now. I thought I had. Sorry CrackShell, you deserved enthusiastic praise for your previous work. Apparently I only shared that with some friends.

Hammerwatch 2 is the high quality lo-fi alternative to Diablo 4 coming out August 15th, and there’s a free demo on Steam right now. I’ve been having a blast playing that demo: if you want a dungeon-delving ARPG hack-and-slash, try this. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper than $70.

I loved the prior two games (Hammerwatch and Heroes of Hammerwatch). 2013’s Hammerwatch was everything I wanted a modern remake of Gauntlet to be—and was far better than Gauntlet’s official rerelease which came out one year later. 2020’s Heroes of Hammerwatch took that base game and then added in more character classes, meta progression between dungeon runs that neatly straddled individual advancement and shared multiplayer improvements, far more loot, more puzzles and traps and enemies, more bosses, new game plus modes, mutators and difficulty modifiers… more everything. Then, HoH went ahead and tacked on sizeable expansions as well.

Hammerwatch 2 takes many of the advances CrackShell made with HoH, and shifts them into a broader ARPG context, complete with exploration, quests, crafting, a far larger world with individual and interlinked dungeons, and any number of other additions. Having played about five hours in the demo so far, Hammerwatch 2 feels like a success. It’s compelling, it offers a familiar-but-new approach to the first two games’ mastery of hack-and-slash, and it’s just plain satisfying.

I do have a few quibbles. I also have faith that CrackShell will continue developing and patching the game—as they did with previous titles—and so I’m not too worried about the issues I’m about to raise.

First, the Hammerwatch games so far have all made incredible use of secrets and hidden spaces. I’ve enjoyed that a great deal. In the first two games, those were not necessary to progress through the game; you did need to find all the secrets in the first game in order to get the best ending, but in HoH those secrets were optional despite being interesting and rewarding. In the demo for Hammerwatch 2 there is one un-clued “secret” which you need to uncover in order to best traverse later spaces in the game (there’s a hidden hookshot, finding it is not part of a quest). I don’t think that’s a good choice. Then again, this is the demo, and perhaps the hookshot will be hidden elsewhere or its location will be alluded to by some character in the full game. I hope that changes, we will see.

Second, in HoH loot was instanced so that everyone was rewarded and no one player could hoover up all the goodies. All gold and meta-progression resources were shared when collected as well. I haven’t yet played multiplayer in the demo, but I understand that loot in Hammerwatch 2 isn’t currently instanced. I think that may be okay if people play with their friends, but there are certain pickups which reward a single player with additional attribute points or skill points. Whether or not all other loot is instanced, I believe that loot (skill and attribute point potions) shouldn’t be unique in a run. Racing to pick up the single, rare bonus skill point potion doesn’t feel fun to me.

Third, Hammerwatch 2 has introduced a crafting system, and it feels just a tad off. The demo crafting system has what feels like a needless extra level of complexity, turning the most basic collected crafting resources into the actually useful components before turning those components into useful items. Impressively, that’s the only complaint about the crafting system I have at the moment—it’s a totally new system for the series, and (apart from that quibble) it feels good. I’m occasionally unsure why I’d want some craftables, but that could be fixed with more informative item descriptions and clearer environmental interactions elsewhere in the game (e.g. “Rope: useful for climbing down cliffs or into caves”).

Important to all of this: I trust CrackShell to improve on these things. I won’t be surprised if the game launches with some of my issues here unresolved, but I believe that in the longer term those sorts of things will be patched up. Furthermore, none of these complaints have gotten in the way of having a blast playing Hammerwatch 2’s demo.

I mean that. I’ve been having a great time playing Hammerwatch 2’s demo, and I am really looking forward to playing with more friends. CrackShell already knew how to make a good dungeon-delving ARPG style game. It looks like they’ve got a good handle on how to turn that into a far bigger game complete with exploration and a multitude of environments too.

Obviously, I’ll reserve final judgment for the final version. Hammerwatch 2 isn’t going to do it for you if you crave glossy graphics and hate pixel art, but if the full game expands on this demo the way it looks like it will… wow. The demo is already a good game. I’m still having fun five hours in, and I’m eager for more!