Heroes of Hammerwatch

I tried Hammerwatch quite a long while, possibly years, ago. Today I tried it's sequel, Heroes of Hammerwatch. I found the latter to have more content as well as being slightly better overall, but for the most part, it's more of the same so I'll speak of them together as just "Hammerwatch".

Hammerwatch is a randomly generated dungeon crawler / action rogue-like. It has a few different classes to choose from, which each come with their own abilities and playstyle. The game revolves around entering a dungeon, killing stuff in there, leveling up, finding items and gold and eventually dying to do it all over again, but this time with extra power from the levels you've gained and the power-ups you've bought with your gold. There's an end too, after which point you can do the whole thing over again at a harder difficulty. Maybe use a different class, whatever suits you.

It didn't suit me much though. The beginning was slow and combat didn't feel particularly impactful. I tried out a couple ranged classes and as such, my gameplay was limited to running backwards and shooting whatever I had available at the monsters who were generally beelining at me. Some also had ranged attacks or charges I had to dodge.
Most progression (levels and items) was just upping numbers so I could kill monsters faster and survive stronger hits against me while the enemies did the same. In essence, not much changed. Okay, in truth, the item system was pretty cool in that they all stacked and had some set bonuses, making it all a bit like an incremental game, the elements of which I always enjoy in my other games. I had no choice in which items I got though, so any strategic element was lost there.

Overall, I feel Hammerwatch is another of those games which prioritizes quantity of content over quality of content. Many people have over 50, some even over 200 hours of playtime, but as they admit, it's mostly just a grind. Because I have no shortage of games to play, it's not important to me that I could pour so much time into this game - I'd rather enjoy myself more over a shorter time. If anything, I feel it's kind of like a worse-but-longer-lasting version of Risk of Rain or just a not-so-good version of Realm of the Mad God. Maybe if the multiplayer was working properly I could have at least had more fun playing with my friends, but as it is, the gameplay is just too dull for me to recommend.