Hammerting

The game has real strengths, and one can see where they wanted to make it even more expansive and complex. However, mirroring those strengths, are some real foundational coding and resource problems. Each dwarf is using a processor thread continually. over 10 and the speed of the game starts tanking. Get to 40 and even normal speed is having a challenging time. The entire viewable map is stored and seems to lead to some form of buffer overflows in the graphics card. This allows for the ability to seemlessly zoom out to the whole map. But it becomes an unweildly amount of data. Waves are allowed to spawn in any darkened area... considering their are multiple lairs scattered throughout the map, this becomes a hassle and irritating. If someone had a massive processor and grasphics setup, maybe this game would be palyable in the fashion it is designed to be. I also play oxygen not included, which has better task, resource, and system resource management, but the lack of the fighting elements can lead the game to dragging by comparison. However, it never falls apart and becomes unplayable like Hammerting. I love playing the game until it becomes unplayable.

The game looks great, and the world is interesting, but the actual things you do in the game are >80% menial tasks with no genuine depth or strategy. The good parts of the game are: 1. building and mining 2. settlement planning The bad parts of the game are literally everything else. You want to upgrade your 8 dwarves' equipment? Sure, click on each one.. then select the right item.. for each of the 6 slots. Want to upgrade their living quarters? No problem, just click on each one.. then change tab, click on the upgrade, click on confirm.. for all ~12 upgrades, most of which you can't queue up until the previous upgrades have been built. This is what you will spend 80% or more of your time doing, and the rest of the time is spent flailing around with the worst combat I have ever seen in any game in my life, where you can't even tell your dwarves to group up before attacking so they all run in one by one and get battered. I think to summarize, it's as if the developers just kept adding features in an attempt to ignore the glaring flaw that is not actually developing the main game loop. There are tons of features, but no fleshing out of the core attraction of the game. Complexity does not equal content. More tasks to do does not make the game have depth. There is no strategy when there is only one reasonable way to play. Your typical RTS has infinitely more depth, despite having near zero customization and feature complexity. That is because a typical RTS knows what it is, stays in its lane and does one thing well. Hammerting didn't. People say it's abandoned, but I see the opposite problem: I think they tried way too hard, in the wrong direction. I have immense respect for the skill in implementing all these things, it's just a shame that skill was not adequately directed toward improving the core features of building, combat and civil planning. If that were the focus of development, it would likely have been a 10/10.

This title has come a long way since it's beginning. It has plenty of complexity, some unique features, and looks pretty good, even by today's standards.

The game crashes after 20 min o game play due to vulcan error. no solution found online.

A very fun to play game. I will come back and continue to play it.