Heroes of Hammerwatch II Review Summary

Fun, addictive, great with friends: The game is highly enjoyable and addictive, especially when playing with friends in co-op. It features a satisfying progression system, endless replayability, and a good balance of challenge and reward. The developers are also responsive to feedback, ensuring continuous improvement.

Improved sequel, familiar gameplay: The game is a worthy successor that improves upon its predecessors, retaining the core gameplay while introducing new features and enhancements. It offers a familiar yet fresh experience for fans of the series, with improved graphics, mechanics, and overall polish.

Deep character customization and progression: The game offers diverse and customizable character builds through varied classes, subclasses, skills, and equipment. Leveling up different classes provides permanent bonuses to all characters, encouraging experimentation and replayability. This creates a rewarding sense of progression and interconnectedness.

Appealing and detailed pixel art: The game features beautiful and detailed pixel art, creating a visually appealing and nostalgic experience. The graphics are well-polished and contribute to the game's overall charm, even if they are not the primary focus.

Combines ARPG and roguelike elements: The game combines ARPG and roguelike elements, offering fast-paced combat, deep progression, and high replayability. It draws inspiration from classic games like Diablo, Gauntlet, and Rogue Legacy, creating a unique and engaging experience.

Lacks content and variety: The game is criticized for lacking content, depth, and variety compared to its predecessor and other games in the genre. Reviewers note repetitive environments, enemy types, and gameplay loops, leading to a stale experience, especially in New Game+ modes. Many feel the game was released in an unfinished state.

Poor class and build balance: Class balance is a major issue, with significant disparities in effectiveness, especially in the late game. Melee builds are often less viable than ranged, and some classes become obsolete in New Game+ due to poor scaling and the shadow curse mechanic. This leads to homogenization of builds and forces players to level all classes.

Excessive visual clutter/poor visibility: The game suffers from significant visual clutter due to excessive effects and similar color palettes, making it difficult to distinguish enemies, projectiles, and items. This is compounded by a lack of transparency settings and the blending of elements into the background, leading to reliance on the minimap and eye strain.

Numerous bugs and instability: The game is plagued with bugs, ranging from minor glitches to game-breaking issues like falling through the floor, getting stuck in walls, and losing progress. Multiplayer is particularly unstable, with frequent crashes, disconnects, and desynchronization problems, making it unplayable for some.

Poor difficulty and stat scaling: The game's difficulty scaling is poorly implemented, particularly in New Game+ modes. Enemies gain excessive health and armor, while player stats and gear do not scale adequately, leading to damage sponge enemies and a grindy experience. This makes many builds ineffective and diminishes the sense of progression.

Roguelite ARPG with persistent progression: The game blends roguelite and ARPG elements, featuring persistent character progression, randomized dungeons, and a focus on loot collection. Players embark on runs to gather resources and gear, returning to upgrade their characters and town. This creates a gameplay loop centered around character building, dungeon crawling, and meta-progression.

Town building enhances progression: Players gather resources during runs to build and upgrade their town, unlocking new shops and services. Town building serves as a central progression element, providing tangible benefits that enhance future runs. This creates a sense of long-term progression and investment in the game world.

Procedurally generated dungeons: The game features procedurally generated dungeons with varied enemies, traps, and level designs. While some reviewers find the dungeons generic, the procedural generation aims to provide a unique experience on each run. This element is core to the roguelite nature of the game.

Shared progression between characters: Leveling up one character provides stat bonuses to other characters, creating a sense of interconnected progression. This encourages players to experiment with different classes and rewards them for investing time in multiple characters. This system adds a layer of strategic depth to character progression.

Repetitive runs and incremental improvements: The core gameplay loop involves repetitive runs and incremental stat improvements, which some reviewers find grindy. While shortcuts and boons can be unlocked to make runs easier or more rewarding, the fundamental structure remains the same. The New Game Plus system exacerbates this repetition for some players.

Inconsistent stability and performance: The game's stability and performance are inconsistent. While some players report smooth gameplay and few bugs, others experience crashes, game-breaking bugs, and performance degradation over time. The frequency and severity of these issues vary, suggesting potential hardware or configuration dependencies.

Variable Steam Deck performance: Steam Deck performance is mixed, with reports of stuttering, lag, and frame rate degradation over extended play sessions. Some users have found that setting compatibility to Proton improves the experience, while others still encounter issues like long loading times and the need for manual UI adjustments.

Disruptive gameplay bugs exist: Several bugs can disrupt gameplay, including players getting stuck in walls or a ghost state, tombstone deletion preventing revivals, and players transforming into unintended entities. These issues can often be resolved by rejoining the game, but some may be game-breaking.

Visual clarity and comfort issues: Visual clarity and comfort are concerns, with reports of eye strain, headaches, and nausea due to foliage sway, ground detail, and rapid pixel movement. Some areas are too dark, while others are too bright, requiring frequent gamma adjustments.

Control and glitch issues: Players have reported occasional control unresponsiveness during intense action and inconsistent audio/visual glitches. Additionally, controller support can be problematic, with issues like the character always facing downwards when loading a new stage.

Buggy, unpolished, lacks content: The game is plagued with bugs, unpolished UI, and a lack of content, making it feel like an early access title rather than a full release. Many reviewers suggest waiting for patches and updates to address these issues before purchasing. Some even mention progress-destroying bugs that can occur without warning.

Repetitive, tedious endgame: Some reviewers find the game becomes tedious and repetitive, especially in the endgame or NG+ cycles. The shadow curse mechanic is specifically called out as a major detractor from the experience. This leads to a lack of replayability and a feeling that the game's design needs an overhaul.

Compared unfavorably to predecessor: Several reviewers compare the game to its predecessor, Heroes of Hammerwatch 1 (HoH1). Some feel the sequel falls short in terms of content, polish, and overall enjoyment, recommending HoH1 instead. Others believe that if the sequel receives similar support and updates as the first game, it has the potential to be great.

Optimistic about future updates: Reviewers are optimistic about the game's future, noting that the developers are actively working on it and responding to player feedback. They look forward to future updates, improvements, and content additions. This inspires confidence in the game's potential for growth.

Recommended for genre fans: The game is recommended for fans of roguelike and ARPG genres. Some reviewers compare it to other popular titles like Diablo and Path of Exile. This point highlights the game's appeal to players who enjoy these types of games.

Simple, grindy gameplay: The game is designed for grindy fun with a simple premise and minimal story. Some reviewers express hope for future improvements and content additions.

Community language mods available: The game lacks native support for multiple languages, but modding support allows the community to create and share language packs. This addresses localization issues and expands accessibility.

Anticipation for future content: Players anticipate future DLC and updates that will add new content, items, classes, campaigns, and endings. There is a desire for continued expansion of the game's content and features.

Town upgrades and shared progression: The game features town upgrades and encourages creating multiple characters, as each character provides passive buffs based on their level. Progression is shared among characters, except for level.

Roguelike with trinket collection: The game sticks to its roguelike roots, with frequent deaths being a core part of the experience. The large pool of trinkets reduces the randomness to the order in which they are obtained.