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. Having played about five hours in the demo so far, Hammerwatch 2 feels like a success. 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. Then, HoH went ahead and tacked on sizeable expansions as well. 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. 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. I loved the prior two games (Hammerwatch and Heroes of Hammerwatch).

I’ve been having a blast playing that demo: if you want a dungeon-delving ARPG hack-and-slash, try this.

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

How do i play the diablo 4 demo