Heroes of Hammerwatch: Ultimate Edition Quick Hit Review

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Who wants a rogue-lite action RPG with all the trimmings? The Heroes of Hammerwatch: Ultimate Edition is now available from Crackshell and it brings with it more classes, more upgrades, and more levels to complete now on the Nintendo Switch. Procedurally generated levels will keep you coming back for more as you try to level up and collect more items. So let’s see how it stacks up in our Heroes of Hammerwatch quick hit review.

I entered into this title with no knowledge of its gameplay or setup and was happily surprised when it turned out to be a pretty good old-style RPG. It caught me a little off guard, to begin with, because of how the game was set up. It is top-down, which isn’t bad, and you use your joysticks to control the direction that your attacks will go. Your strategy will determine how you handle the enemies in the mine and other levels. Some characters will be close quarters and some will have ranged attacks. There are no specific slots to equip armor or weapons. All of your gear will go into your inventory and automatically give you passive skill changes.

The levels, while procedurally generated, offer a nice arena to look at no matter how many times you die and reset them. Each level has its own set of traps, enemies, and more to explore as you go to collect money and ore from the ground. There are elevators on each level that you must use to extract your materials. These materials are used to buy weapons, armor, items, and upgrade your town. Each upgrade will give you more to buy and use on your quest to defeat the enemies on each level.

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The best part of this RPG system is the skills that you can learn. You get a couple of points from each time that you level up. Each skill gets point bonuses as you increase their skill level. There are also passives, like the shield skill, which has a chance to block projectile attacks. You can play as any of your characters up to four. The money from each raid goes towards each character as well.

The one thing I didn’t like about this title is the top-down mode’s distance. You are very small on the screen and can’t see much of the detail for the characters and enemies. The controls that you have to use on the Switch aren’t that great either because it’s difficult to control the direction of the attacks. I would rather use the mouse and keyboard. Learning the different traps and enemy attack patterns can take a little more time than you might be comfortable with and they confused me for a good couple of hours at first. If the creatures or traps kill you then your character is returned to the town and you lose all of your items and armor from your inventory. You keep your levels and experience points though and can still use whatever money you had before dying.

Overall, Heroes of Hammerwatch: Ultimate Edition is a good game for the most part. I watched people play it on PC and thought it was better using the mouse and keyboard but it has its moments on the Switch as well. Leveling up through using multiple characters is a good way to open up new avenues in your town and at shops that can be upgraded. With all of the DLC content, you will have many hours of great gameplay to partake of.

Note: Our copy was reviewed on Switch with a code provided by PR.

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