HammerHelm
by Aethyna
Dec 10, 2019 |
1
Votes |
3
Played |
0
Reviews
8
rate
Genres:
Simulation , RPGGraphics:
3DLabels:
City Building , Fantasy Setting , Dungeon/ Instance , Crafting , ManagementPlatforms:
Publishers:
SOEDESCO Publishing HammerHelm is a town-building RPG where you’ll get to recruit new dwarves to your town, assign them their roles, and venture into the wilderness yourself on epic adventures, whether it is to clear a dungeon of its vermin or to collect more resources to develop your town. Play Now Similar Games Played
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Summary
Featuring the child-friendly vibe of RPGs like Wizard 101, HammerHelm is a town-building RPG where you’ll get to recruit new dwarves to your town, assign them their roles, and venture into the wilderness yourself on epic adventures, whether it is to clear a dungeon of its vermin or to collect more resources to develop your town. There are plenty of quests to do, places to explore, and buildings to construct as your town grows.
Plotline
In HammerHelm, dwarves have always lived underground that is until you came along. You dreamed of seeing the sky and feel the sun on your skin, and one day, you decided to pursue your dream. Thankfully, you won’t be alone.
You realized that there are actually quite a lot of dwarves who dreamed to live on the surface as well and if you could provide them with a home, they’d be willing to move to your growing town and help you turn it into the thriving city you know it could be!
Gameplay
The game starts you off with a story introduction and a character creation screen where you’ll get to customize your character. There are several options available, but if you choose a male character, you’ll have a lot more, mainly due to the now-unlocked beard and mustache options. However, I’ve noticed that the game doesn’t let you rotate your character model so you can’t really see the back part of the hairstyle you’ve chosen until you’re in the game and are looking at the back of the head of your character.
There are two main aspects of the gameplay here in HammerHelm – The first being the town-building/city management aspect where you’ll have to assume your role of a mayor (of some sort); and the second mainly consists of questing, exploring and battling enemies, though you can throw in some resource-gathering as well.
Now, in terms of its town-building and city management aspect, this game pretty much has everything down to pat (except some minor grievances which I’ll sum up at the end of the review). The game has a building mode where you’ll be able to decide the layout of your town from a top-down view. You can move buildings around as necessary, change the color of its roof to make it easier to differentiate buildings, build roads, and even upgrade certain buildings, if that option is available.
The game also features over 30 different buildings, which will in turn unlock access to various crafting recipes and roles for your dwarves so they can learn a profession rather than just perform manual labor. Note that each dwarf you recruit comes with his or her own personality traits and it’s up to you to recruit the best possible dwarves for your town.
There are also other needs that you can try to fulfill such as food, aesthetics – dwarves appreciate beauty as well, hygiene, warmth and water supply. However, from what I can see, your dwarves won’t die if you don’t give them what they want. At most, they will be a bit discontent, but will still do whatever work you assigned them to do. Don’t push it, though! They might just decide to leave your town if you mistreat them.
The rest of the gameplay in HammerHelm is, however, still a bit of a work in progress and could use a revamp. The quests, for instance, are fairly uninspiring, consists of the usual trope, which basically means you either kill stuff or fetch stuff, and there isn’t a lot of variety… yet. There are also instanced dungeons, such as the haunted mansion, in this game where there are some simple puzzles and a somewhat exciting boss fight at the end, but those are, unfortunately, few and far in between.
Its hack-and-slash combat could be sped up a bit too. It currently feels slow and clunky, and sometimes, the Tab key which you’ll use to switch targets feels unresponsive. As mentioned before, I do have some minor grievances about its town-building aspect as well. There’s currently no option to unassign someone from a job, which is completely different from swapping jobs; and there’s no way to destroy a building and recover materials.
Since a lot of running around is involved, it’d be nice if there’s a “toggle to run” button instead of having to press on the Shift key for long periods of time. Naturally, there will be crashes so make sure to save often!
Community
HammerHelm is a single-player experience and from what I can see, it’ll remain so. However, being an early access game, you should know that its discussion forum on Steam is very active, with players giving feedback and the devs taking those feedback into account when improving their game.
Graphics/ Sound
To be honest, the graphics in HammerHelm looks rather dated, but that is not to say that the game doesn’t have any eye-candy at all. There are a few picturesque locations around the map that look great during daylight. The music in this game is pretty alright as well.
Conclusion
For an early access game, HammerHelm does show potential as a simple yet fun, dwarf-themed town-building RPG. Considering how active the community and the devs are, given time, I’m sure the game would turn out to be an excellent game. However, until then, feel free to wishlist the game on Steam or if you’d like to try the game out yourself, you can buy the game outright.
HammerHelm Blog
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