Recent reviews by Sheppa

10 year old game, Bethesda still breaking everything and charging more for the privilege. Stop touching it.

Very cool demo.

I really liked the movement and combat, it feels great. And managing your maggots while trying to beat on the bosses is neat.

I had a good time checking out the map and secret hunting, can't wait for the full game.

Latest update managed to crash and corrupt my save. Let this be a reminder to manually back up your save once in a while.

Heroes of Hammerwatch 2 feels like a partial remake of the first one.

The only meaningful upgrade to me is the graphics, but it lost some of the style the first game had in the process. Everything else feels simplified or cut back from the first game. There are less enemy types, less types of traps, less skills, less classes to play, no puzzles, less varied maps, less trinkets to use. I also ran into several large texture issues, broken fonts and a couple of crashes.

The new gear system isn't interesting to me, the only important stat is your main stat. 90% of gear you pick up during a run is trash, with the other 10% being for a different class. Very few items are something you would/could actually equip.

The enemy design has some issues for me too, there's a decent spread of archetypes but a few that are way more dangerous than everything else. The entire last zone is full of multicast enemies who can deal 100x more damage than anything else in the game. There's also a zone full of enemies who will both silence and disarm you, great fun for a melee class.

The maps don't have a lot of differences between runs, and i noticed several that were actually just identical. You fight the same bosses in the same order, every level has the same enemies as the last run, and there is a low enough quantity of items that you end up with the same ones every run.

There's new game+ modes, but all they do is crank up the enemy damage and destroy your resistances. You will always be at a massive disadvantage with your armor/resistances because your gear doesn't keep up with the penalties. Most trinkets don't scale either. To top it off there are many enemies that will further reduce your armor/resistances for the duration of a run, which super sucks because several of the classes are built on tanking/trading hits. There's even shields in the game :(

I just hope this game gets the same care as the first Heroes of Hammerwatch and they even out the issues.

There's quite a bit of fun here, but the patches in the last 3 weeks have been a pretty heavy downturn in quality. Once human has become the worst feeling multiplayer game I've played.

The server performance keeps getting worse, with everything desynchronizing until all of your hits land at the same instant. This happens everywhere, even if I'm alone in an area or doing a solo dungeon. Sometimes it takes 15 seconds for things to register. The bigger PVE fights are so laggy that it doesn't even feel like you're participating until suddenly it's over. With the boss and a bunch of players falling over. PVP feels like you're a ghost shooting at other ghosts until one of you explode instantly, or maybe both of you explode, it's up to the server.

My game performance is getting worse with each patch, I've had to lock my fps to 60 since higher fps gives me massive input lag and stutters in this game. And the last two patches have added a bunch of new texture issues like flashing lights/skyboxes, and I would swear there is 2x more image ghosting while moving than there was when I started.

There is also a persistent glitch, requiring a full game restart every hour or I get unplayable input lag/stutters. I think it's related to a UI issue or the map, because the game doesn't start using extra memory or cpu%. And there's a problem with the UI from your inventory showing up as pop up boxes while you're running around.

My other gripe is the game has a very small amount of free or low priced character customization, in 200 hours I've gotten 3 hats and a pair of pants and they look awful, they're handed out to everyone and I've never seen anyone wearing them.
But what really grinds my gears is their paid cosmetics are very expensive. With the only good looking ones in lootboxes that have no limit on how much money you can spend before you get the clothing you want. I hate the idea that you can spend 500 USD and not get the set of pants for your character that you wanted. Also note that most everything you get in the shop is locked to a single character, not account wide. Gacha games have better monetization than this. And the most recent lootbox has worse chances of getting the big prize than the last one did. I doubt it will improve.

I'll wait awhile before checking out the game again after my server wipes next week. There's a lot of fun to be found here between the player interactions, cool themes, base building and gameplay. But they really need to get a handle on their servers. Doubly so because the next season is PvP focused. The idea of playing 4 weeks with everyone teleporting around and unable to deal damage correctly doesn't interest me at all.

I poked my head back into the game and played a few rounds to see what was new since the last time I played. I tried out the new terminid rupture strain, fought the illuminate a few times and dove against the bots. None of the things added in the last few months was any fun to fight against.

The new terminids that dig are miserable to fight against, and super buggy. They dig out through walls and auto hit you. The digging spewer is a stand out because it pops out of the ground, and 0.05 seconds later deletes you. And there's only a few weapons that work well against them since everything has medium armor. I thought the dragonroach was really cool until I realized it cheats, the fire isnt a projectile like the bile titan. It just drops right on you no matter what you do, and I hate that the wings aren't a weakspot, it can fly just fine when they're completely shot out. Hivelord cool though but he's rare and you don't have to fight it.

The illuminate are mostly the same as when they launched, but now every patrol you run into has 4 of the fleshbag enemies that still run though terrain, still ragdoll you without hitting you, still ignore crowd-control effects randomly and still are just dps checks with no weakspots. And those flying leviathans that rag-doll you for 30 seconds straight or instakill you, and just infinitely spawn in aren't fun at all. Why do the developers keep adding things that aren't fun or interesting to fight?

I tried dropping the bots a few times, but really did not like fighting the war striders, there's so many of them and they're so much less fun to fight than the rest of the bots lineup. They don't have a weakspot, they spawn in big packs, they spam grenades over cover, they have lasers that knock you down, they can be dropshipped in groups and they're relatively fast. I've been rag-dolled for 30 seconds straight by these guys and it isn't fun. The worst bit is they break my audio when I fight them.

I guess I could skip fighting the digging terminids, avoid the illuminate completely and dodge automaton warstrider seeds, but I really wish they would add things that are fun to play against.

I played up until chapter 5, did a bunch of the side missions and just stopped having fun. The number of times you get one shot by plasma weapons or a melee attack skyrocketed and it really isn't entertaining to be deleted by a single enemy out of the 20 you're fighting frequently. I really enjoyed the level aesthetics though, the devs did an excellent job with the 40k vibe. Everything from the enemies to the weapons and the levels sell the hive city the game is set in.

Enemies aren't really fun to fight though, they either sprint into melee range or sprint to 5 feet from you and shoot. They're often very tanky, having both a energy shield and a physical shield that absorbs all damage. Or a massive pool of health to burn through with a combination of the shields. There's also a elemental damage system with fire, lightning, radiation and toxin damage, but it isn't explained anywhere and enemies don't show you what they're weak against.

I have big problems with the looting system, where you only have a few slots for each type of item. Meaning you can only keep 6 of each class of weapon, and 4 armors and 4 trinkets. I'm not sure why the developers would put in so many types of weapons if you can only keep 6. By the 5th story mission I had access to like 12 rifle weapon types, and about 10 pistol types but because weapons come in loot tiers that do more damage, have more accuracy, etc. so many of the things i'd like to try out I left behind for their higher rarity versions. Then you can only choose 3 big weapons and 2 pistols into a mission, plus your permanent starter pistol.

The game had a little bit of jank that i'm ok with, including dying to terrain and missions softlocking. But my biggest complaint is with the sound design. Something about the audio isn't mixed right, enemies are almost completely silent when they aren't yelling at you. Gunfire is either extremely punchy or inaudible and enemies more than 20 feet from you don't make noise when they shoot. Maps like the train mission are very loud in some parts, like down near the suspension, but sometimes that area is just a light buzzing sound. Some areas like the forge were virtually silent despite being in a giant manufactorum. Necromunda has a metal soundtrack and its pretty good though.

And also what kind of game forces mouse acceleration? I shouldn't have enable a script in a config file to turn it off.

Anyway, Necromunda Hired Gun is trying really hard to be a doom clone set in the 40k universe but misses the design considerations and the polish that made Doom and Doom Eternal such pillars in the genre. Tacking on an annoying loot system didn't do it any favors and the story might as well not exist.

Awful writing and boring gameplay. Comes with a slew of performance issues, bugs, and straight up crashes.

It's the soulless husk of an old friend shambling about, nothing left of what it used to be except bittersweet memories.

The game isn't finished and it released too early, It should probably still be listed as early access.

Balance changes are being made among weapons and classes, chunks of content that probably should have been present at launch are in development. Lots of mission ending bugs still around. The devs seem to patch pretty often and have an active discord so maybe they'll get it hammered out.

My experience was 100% in solo campaign mode and it just wasn't well put together.

The campaign mode is an Xcom 2 map laid over what feel like multiplayer quickplay missions. Outside of the few main story set-piece missions, they're all randomly generated with 1 main objective and infinitely generating side missions as you do the actual top down shooting. I'm OK with that as a concept but there's like 5 of these objective types and they all boil down to go here and shoot. There's even fewer maps to do these limited number of missions on. I ended my 30 hour campaign when it became 5 runs of an identical mission back-to-back as my colonies got infested.

The combat might as well be a timed on-rails shooter, because the longer you take the harder enemies the game spawns. Which forces you to run as directly to objectives as you can because of the second big problem, the bot companions. The AI companions leave the player to do 99% of the heavy lifting. They don't do enough damage or have enough skills to deal with anything bigger than trash enemies without direct player intervention. Doubling down on this is the enemy mechanics where you have to debuff harder enemies' insane healing or armor before you can kill them. The bot classes generally can't debuff at all, and mostly fail to do so correctly even if you bring a bot that can.

This would be mitigated in multiplayer where you can synergize classes but the bot classes literally do not have the same options available as the player. They get simple versions of some of the class skills, can't carry as big of weapons, have limited suit upgrades and can't use items at all. To top it off you only get 3 of them with you, restricting your choices further.

The biggest issue with the game is that nothing is explained, players are left to guess at huge portions of game mechanics. Infestation on the campaign map, what research does, what rewards you get from missions, damage types, debuffs. The game doesn't even tell you how to get ammo for your companions, because apparently they run out of ammo and that isn't mentioned anywhere. (They get magic ammo from opening lockers)

I don't want to count the number of times i had to search the dev's discord for information about things that absolutely should have been explained in game or been in the tutorial. I have hundreds of hours in similar games and this game had me blindly guessing at core gameplay features the entire time.

I really like the idea of this game and bought into it because of its Warcraft III / Starcraft 2 custom map heritage but it's just disappointing. There's no way i could recommend this to any of my friends in its current state.