Hammerwatch

I've been playing this with a six year old girl my partner and I watch after sometimes. It's one of the few games that she can manage with me easily thanks to different game play modifications which and be ticked on and off easily like 'Unlimited Lives' and 'Quick Health Regen.' Also one of the rarer titles nowadays that is choc-full of secrets. This is a must have if you have others in the household who play on the computer with you. Also check out Dungeonland.

This game moves slow, and is very repetitive, but still awesome. You're constantly mowing down dozens of enemies through retro-styled dungeons, looting gold while trying not to get surrounded and die. Hammerwatch is old-school difficult and unforgiving. Enemies do lots of damage, most traps kill you instantly, and the game is auto-saved each time you lose a life, in a roguelike "permadeath" fashion. However, you don't feel pressured while you play, so this is a "must focus on not doing mistakes" gamestyle. You can turn on some "casual-friendly" cheats to have infinite lives or hp regeneration, but please don't do that. Without the challenge, the game gets boring fast. The single player mode loses a bit of potential, because some characters work better on some enemies, and so the deepest experience would be a multiplayer run in which you try to maximize the skills of each character. However, as it's quite difficult to find skilled teammates to play such a difficult game, I suppose most people will play this game solo. Hammerwatch is a gem, but is not for everyone. If you are a retrogamer and like the formula, you'll LOVE it. If you are a casual gamer, stay away from it: even if cheats can allow you to beat the game, it will be at the cost of your enjoyment.

The game is an indie gauntlet like game with retro style graphics. I was originally intrigued by it and wanted to give it a go and the start it didn't seem to bad and I had high hopes for it but it soon turned out to be a fairly mindless bland action game with save points, mindless, nonsensical designed dungeons, no or real plot or character development, repetitive game play with little to no real variation and fairy boring and drab locations. These days there are stacks of indie games out there and asking the price for this product is far to high. I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone and it fails to stand out from the crowd or do anything different or in depth.

I knew several Gauntlet episodes. I knew Get Medieval and this one is a a mix of all that: fast, massive monster hordes, monster generators and some unique characters. Okay the bow guy is rather normal, but the fire breathing wizard with his fireballs that only fly like 5 meters or so? And then there ist that Paladin, a guy that chops away with up to 6 slashes per second (!!). Yes, is a c64 Declathon-thing, and stresses your attack button rather nicely when you chop away, because every attack is triggered individually. Every chop is a keystroke. So the Paladin could be your character of choice if you are one of these high-A.P.M. players ... or you're hyper active ;) I just love the real LAN mode - Yay! And the music is short, but nicely done. I payed more to get less with other games.