Recent reviews by badminton

The campaign is short, but the pacing is incredible. Even more so than the first game. I didn't feel like there was any padding, it's just set piece after set piece, so keep that in mind when figuring out your $/hr figure. It's the difference between hiring a Lambo for 3 hours or a Corolla for the day.

I like it. It gives me State of Decay vibes but with more flexible base building, better resource gathering and a random gen rural map. There's no real tutorial and zombies are very dangerous if you're not prepared for them, so expect to die several times before you get the hang of the combat. Or watch a few minutes of more experienced players fighting.

It leans more toward realism than a lot of zombie games; The player character isn't particularly over-powered, most of the NPCs are out for #1 and will shake you down or kill you, but they also raid each other's bases which can leave some decent loot laying around if you're sneaky. Or if you want to grave rob after the funeral. You can eventually craft basic items, so most of the stuff you need will have to be scavenged or traded.

Looting a town can be sphincter puckering knowing that one zombie could bring a dozen so easily. Zombies can't enter buildings and will eventually disperse if you have enough food and water to wait them out. Sneaking up on a group of kitted out looters sitting around a camp fire can be intense. Hurling dozens of molotovs over the walls of a bandit faction's base while laughing maniacally can be fun.

My only real gripe is how regularly your base gets attacked by zombies and raiders that specifically spawn just to B-line to your settlement. It's a bit jarring when everything else about the game seems so emergent. It's also annoying having to babysit your NPC community so often because they run out of the base into a swarm of zombies waving a steak knife. You can lock the gates to your base but then nobody will leave to gather resources. So you're constantly having to lock/unlock your gates or set and cancel NPC activity zones every time you're about to get attacked. It's just a bit tedious and gamifies what is an otherwise fantastic survival experience. That's usually where I stop playing for a bit before it inevitably calls me back.

The game is still getting regular, fairly substantial updates though and the world gen has some useful options to customise the kind of experience you want. Overall it's a thumbs-up. A second thumbs-up for co-op.

A cat tripped over a disused minecart and fell 50 storeys down a flight of stairs to its death. Stockpiles save lives.

Poor AI and worthless rewards makes solo play pointless (except maybe arena, but then you can't craft your own deck).
Poor balance in the DLC cards and a lack of new/casual players make versus play pointless to other new/casual players.

Otherwise it's an enjoyable game, made far less so by what a giant miss opportunity it is.
It could have been amazing if they made a Thronebreaker/Shandalar RPG out of it. That's a niche that actually needs filling.

I don't like recommending against a game, especially when there's caveats, but since it's not early access anymore I feel like it's fair.

Hammerting is the stereotypical result of a studio of artists and level designers making a game. Behind the beautiful aesthetics it's just a mess of over-simplified gameplay and unnecessarily complicated systems. It's full off odd decisions like the talent tree. The stats system is great, the talent system is great, but why are there are so many talents that boost irrelevant stats? The tiers in the talent tree make no sense either, they don't get any stronger as you work your way down. I understand that the effects are cumulative but why do I have to unlock multiple paths to get max boosts to whitesmithing? And why do my whitesmiths have to unlock stonemasonry and farming skills to progress?

Research is even more messy. Advanced Casting (metalworking), Complex Stonemasonry and Woodworking are all tier 3 but you can't build the large foundry without unlocking woodworking and stonemasonry first. So if you spend your points thinking that iron weapons and tools might be nice then congrats you just soft locked yourself and now you have to focus on exploring until you can get enough points to unlock the other two. Oh, and you can't unlock masonry without first unlocking... farming... and arcana...? Dwarfs starving at the beginning of the game? Oops you have to unlock the almost completely useless early game tech of fishing before you can learn to cook a simple meal. Cave farming doesn't actually farm anything anymore, it's just a way to get water for free. If RNGesus is good to you then maybe you can get some wheat, which you can't use without unlocking... fishing...?

The overworld is a bit of a missed opportunity too. There's no reason to have to map fogged out at the beginning of the game, all it does is arbitrarily limit the trading you're allowed to do, which is already extremely limited and very tedious. Why can't I just build a trade hub in my mountain and set up automatic routes to get the stuff I need? The war is basically meaningless because I don't care about any of the above ground civilisations, none of them are a threat and once a town is captured and rebuilt it's trade as usual with just a change of flag. Sometimes you get good prices for things so a town can rebuild but your gold already builds so quickly it becomes a meaningless number. Dwarfs should be the peacekeepers, if one faction becomes too powerful they should attack the player and trigger a loss rather than have the player win the game. That way you would always have to walk the tightrope of helping out the underdogs to maintain the status quo instead of just befriending the winner. Things would have to happen more slowly so the player could keep on top of them, but they could have quests to send dwarfs on diplomatic or combat missions to give a decent boost if things start to tip too far in one direction.

The UI needs some tweaking too. Things like making sure the professions are in same order for every dwarf, as would having the appropriate modifier at the top of the attribute and talent tool tips (some stats improve a skill by +1 and some by +2, in the tool tip for attributes and talents these seems to be in a completely arbitrary order, just put the +2 at the top and the +1 under those for easy reading).

Exploration is heavily encouraged, but largely unfulfilling. Once you unlock drilling machines ore is essentially unlimited and a single tiny patch can feed your fort indefinitely without the need to explore for more. The places you find are as beautiful as the rest of the game, but mostly meaningless. Deeper ore makes stronger or more expensive items, but the game is easy and gold quickly becomes meaningless so... why am I digging for it?

Those are most of the (hopefully) objectively inexcusable problems I have with Hammerting. The caveats to my negative review are mostly subjective things like how easy the game is. Comparisons to Craft the World are unavoidable, but there's genuine conflict in that game that takes genuine strategy and work to overcome. Hammerting is extremely sedate by comparison, which is great for casual gamers who just want to watch their ant hill grow. The problem is that Craft the World also has a far more flexible building system that lets you customise your ant hill in fantastic ways. Hammerting looks amazing aesthetically, but the variety between your subsequent forts will quickly approach zero. They've tried to add a thin layer of customisation to dwarf rooms, but they all have the same upgrades that go in the same places.

In conclusion: Craft the World is superior in basically every way. If you want something to doodle around with while you watch something on a second monitor then Hammerting might be good for you, if you want a rewarding challenge then maybe not so much. I alternate between the two so I'm a bit ambivalent about posting this but ultimately there are better doodling games out there and better challenging games out there than this one. I hope they keep developing it because it seems a bit half baked at the moment. Thanks for your time.

♥♥♥♥ Hits the Fan: The Video Game.

UI needs a lot of work, especially plopping buildings and unit purchases.
Units could do with some balancing. Granted I've lost over 50% of the games I've played, but there doesn't seem to be any reason not to take squads full of heavies with maybe 1 or 2 medics and/or scientists with flamers. APC them into range of a mound, drop them off until it's dead then move on to the next one. Stealth doesn't seem to exist (at least for very long) despite spec ops and suppressors being a thing. Snipers don't really have much of a role when 1 HMG can kill pretty much everything faster than a squad of snipers. Assault is much the same. Apart from being more conservative on ammo why would I use M4s when I can use MG42s?

♥♥♥♥ hits the fan a little earlier than I'd like sometimes. The main income source is killing zombies and it's a really tight rope to walk between pulling enough to build up a decent defence and having them completely overrun me within minutes of starting a game.

I like where it's going though and, as frustrating as it can be, I keep coming back to it.

Watched a couple of play-throughs a while ago so I pretty much knew what to expect. It's a nicely paced little time-spender that doesn't need a huge amount of attention so it's good for having a coffee while watching a movie or something on a second monitor and just having a quiet couple of hours.

Far, far, far too much emphasis on the player to be really be considered a tower defense game at all. The number of towers you're able to build and the effect they have is almost negligable compared to the player weapons and abilities. There's a very vague sense of synergy with some towers and abilities, but ultimately it comes down to how much damage the player can put out. With the exception of the first few waves in the early levels, tower type and position makes very little difference to how far the creeps get.

It's nice that you get to essentially build your own mazes but most levels are extremely limited in the amount of space you get, which limits the configurations to a few that are actually effective. And then the lack of tower usefulness basically means you're just designing a maze to make the creeps walk far enough for you to kill them with player damage.

I've tried to enjoy it, I've read guides to improve the effectiveness of my tower configuration, tried different characters and weapons to suit the level, but it's just not a fun game for me. It's a pretty big step back from the first Sanctum IMO and there are current free to play games that do it much better, so I couldn't recommend this to anyone who actually wants a first person tower defence game.

Single player is fantastic. If you're happy with that then I recommend it.

Co-op is still a work in progress (hopefully), so if you're looking for Vermintide: 40k then maybe wait and see if they fix/update it first. Almost all of the negative recommendations are only co-op related.

The original version was well worth it.
This is better by far.

Doesn't take a genius :)