Heroes of Hammerwatch

Crackshell is a small Swedish studio that could have coasted. The original Hammerwatch was a competent Gauntlet homage that sold well enough on nostalgia alone. Instead, with Heroes of Hammerwatch, the team asked a sharper question: what happens when you take that arcade DNA — hordes, traps, colored keys, pixel corridors — and bolt it onto the persistent-progression chassis that Rogue Legacy proved out? The answer is a genuinely different game, and a considerably better one.

The premise is simple to the point of austerity. You roll a hero, descend into the procedurally generated floors of the Forsaken Spire, and die. Then you do it again. What separates this from a thousand other rogue-lites is what happens between runs: the gold and ore you haul out of the dungeon funds a growing town of ten upgradeable buildings — blacksmith, apothecary, guild hall, and so on — each of which permanently strengthens every hero you’ll ever roll. Death isn’t a reset. It’s a deposit.

Layer on seven distinct classes in the base game (nine in the Ultimate Edition), a loot pool of over 100 items, online co-op for up to three friends with party-scaled difficulty, and New Game+ modes that keep escalating, and you have a game engineered for the long haul. The Switch Ultimate Edition arrives with all three DLC expansions — Witch Hunter, Pyramid of Prophecy, and Moon Temple — bundled in. This isn’t a prestige release. It’s a workhorse, and it knows it.

• Persistent Town Meta-Progression: Ten upgradeable buildings convert every failed run into permanent, account-wide power. The blacksmith sharpens your weapons, the apothecary extends your potions, the guild hall unlocks skill tiers — and the escalation is tuned tightly enough that even a disastrous run usually pays for something.
• Nine Classes, Distinct: From the tanky Paladin to the glass-cannon Sorcerer, each class plays differently enough to justify a fresh climb. The Ultimate Edition’s two DLC classes (Witch Hunter and Gladiator) aren’t reskins; they change how you route floors.
• Three-Player Online Co-op with Difficulty Scaling: The dungeon gets meaner as your party grows, which keeps co-op from becoming the trivializing cheat code it is in most action RPGs. Shared town progression means friends at different investment levels can still play together productively.

The Loop, and Why It Works

Rogue-lites live or die on a single question: does the player feel like they’re building toward something, or just losing? Heroes of Hammerwatch answers it with unusual clarity. Every run generates two currencies — gold and ore — and the game’s smartest single mechanic is that you have to carry them out. Gold found in the dungeon is taxed on extraction unless you’ve upgraded the treasury; ore only banks when you hit a checkpoint or escape. That one design decision creates real, moment-to-moment tension. Push one more floor for the ore vein you can see on the minimap, or bank what you have? It’s a gambling loop, and it’s honest about it.

The town itself is the game’s actual protagonist. Its growth from a burned-out camp into a functioning settlement gives the whole experience a spine that pure run-based rogue-lites lack. And because upgrades apply to every class, rolling a new hero deep into the campaign feels nothing like rolling one at the start — your Wizard inherits the Paladin’s infrastructure. That’s the “one more run” hook, and Crackshell has tuned it with something approaching cruelty. Sessions are built to evaporate.

Where the Grind Bites

Here’s the firm part of the critique: the early game is too stingy. The first several hours, before the town economy compounds, are a slog of underpowered runs that end on floor two or three with pocket change to show for it. The game eventually pays off that investment lavishly, but the onboarding friction is real, and it’s the most likely reason a new player bounces. Someone who quits at hour three has encountered a fundamentally different game than the one veterans praise.

Solo players face a second tax. Difficulty scaling for parties is well-judged, but the inverse isn’t quite true: certain bosses and swarm rooms are plainly tuned with a second body in mind, and a lone Ranger kiting a hundred enemies through a trap corridor is exhilarating right up until it’s exhausting. The game is playable solo. It is designed for co-op.

Combat: Arcade First, RPG Second

The twin-stick combat itself is deliberately simple — a primary attack, a handful of skills on cooldown, and positioning. Purists raised on Hades-style dash-cancel expressiveness will find it thin. But that reading misses the point. The combat is a crowd-management puzzle, not a duel. The skill expression lives in routing: which rooms you pull, where you funnel the horde, when you burn a cooldown versus when you kite. It’s Gauntlet’s brain in a modern body, and on New Game+ difficulties the routing decisions get legitimately demanding.

The item system rounds things out without dominating. With 100+ items across rarity tiers, builds emerge over a run rather than being pre-planned, and the drip of unlockables gives the loot pool a sense of depth without descending into ARPG spreadsheet territory.

The pixel art is confident and functional — chunky sprites, readable silhouettes, and a color language that communicates threat instantly even when eighty enemies are on screen. That last part matters more than any individual sprite: legibility under chaos is the actual technical achievement here, and Crackshell’s engine is built to deliver it. This is not a game that will win art-direction awards. It’s a game where you always know what’s about to kill you, which is the correct trade.

A 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, and the custom engine is built to hold up when the screen turns into a bullet-and-body soup. The UI is the weakest visual element — menus are utilitarian to the point of drabness, and the item comparison flow feels a generation old. Functional, never elegant.

On Steam, this is the definitive analytical experience. Mouse-aim gives ranged classes a precision advantage, mods and community content extend the tail, and the game’s session-based structure fits desktop play naturally. If you plan to chase New Game+ tiers, play here.

The Switch Ultimate Edition makes a compelling counter-argument, though. Bundling all three DLC expansions — Witch Hunter, Pyramid of Prophecy, Moon Temple — plus the two extra classes into one package removes the à-la-carte friction of the PC version, and the run-based structure is a natural fit for handheld sessions. Twin-stick combat maps cleanly to dual analog sticks; nothing about the control scheme is inherently compromised. The honest caveat: the UI is dense for a small screen, and the extraction-gambling loop is dangerous on a device you take to bed.

Heroes of Hammerwatch is not a revolution, and it doesn’t pretend to be. It’s a precision-engineered compulsion loop wearing a Gauntlet costume, built by a small studio that understood exactly which two genres to fuse and had the discipline to not add a third. Its flaws are real — the cold-start grind will shed impatient players, and solo adventurers get a rougher deal than they should — but they’re flaws of tuning, not of architecture. We rate it a Good: solid but unremarkable, and worth recommending only to the right audience. If you have two friends and a tolerance for earning your power the slow way, the Forsaken Spire is built to quietly consume a great many evenings.