HammerHelm is an under-development title by SuperSixStudios and SOEDESCO which focuses on a single dwarf who is banished from the underground dwarf kingdom for suggesting that Dwarfs can also live above the ground. After you are banished, you must prove to the other dwarfs by building a town above ground that you were right. HammerHelm is a unique title because it combines both city-building and RPG mechanics into a single title. It is currently in its Early Access version on Steam and the developer recently joined hands with SOEDESCO for publishing the game. This is our preview of HammerHelm in which we take a deep dive into the early access build of this brilliant city-building RPG.
HammerHelm offers two completely unique and different experiences. It combines the strategic aspect of building your own town and managing your people with exploring the island and collecting resources and clearing out caves and ruins of dangerous monsters. You are given the option to create your own dwarf at the start of the game however it’s just cosmetic and does not affect the gameplay in any way. As you play the game and complete quests, your dwarf will level up and you can add more skills to your dwarf’s arsenal to make him/her stronger and more efficient.
The quests in HammerHelm are short and quite fun. They are usually pretty simple as sometimes you are required to visit a location and clear out the enemies. Sometimes the townspeople will also want to meet you and give you small tasks regarding their work locations or random tasks around the town or its surroundings. These quests keep popping up and sometimes I forgot to visit the town to check on things as I went from quest to quest collecting gold and items from dead enemies.
This is fine most of the times but certainly not recommended during the early parts of the game as while collecting gold and items during my first playthrough, I forgot to build farms and other food-related buildings which resulted in my town running out of food and I had to start a new game. HammerHelm offers plenty in terms of both town building and exploration that once you start on one, you forget about the other one unless you run out of resources or have to visit the town to complete or begin a new quest.
The early main quests serve as a tutorial and teach you all the basics of the game. Once you are done with them, you basically have the complete rundown of how both building and exploration in the game works. After it, as you continue to expand and build your town, the game keeps throwing a few tips and information here and there to keep the gameplay in flow. You will soon notice that you will need to keep both town building and exploration in balance as both are dependent on each other.
Resources are required for expanding your town and they are only found in the wild and quests give you gold. For more quests, you will need to expand so that more people move into your town and settle down. You will also need to ensure that the citizens that move into your town stay happy so you will need to look out for their needs as well. After the basic needs are fulfilled, you can move on to different other structures in the game and build them for your own benefit but most of the structures benefit the entire community in the game.
The town building mode has a top-down view which offers you a bird’s eye view of your town and gives a clear view of the clear areas and the current layout of your town. You can use this view to place new structures anywhere you want in the allowed space. You can only enter the building mode while you are within this specified building area. Although the game features a pretty big island, your town has a build area and you have to stick to this area to build and expand your town. The build menu automatically displays when you enter the buildable area and goes away when you are out exploring the wilds. This is a pretty neat mechanic and allows you to know easily when you can and when you cannot build. For building, you will need resources and resources are found plenty in HammerHelm.
Surrounding your town is a large island full of resources and enemies. To get resources from caves and other underground areas, you will be required to first clear them out. They are not that hard and I easily managed to wipe out enemies from nearly all caves and underground sections without any problems. To collect resources, you can either collect yourself by chopping down trees or mining from reserves or you can assign tasks to your townspeople. Every time you build a house, you are given the opportunity to choose two citizens to join your town.
You have to choose two from a total of three. Each citizen comes with its own unique strengths and weaknesses. For example, a citizen might be strong enough to carry more resources but might eat more or a citizen might be good in mines but loves animals so will not be a good hunter. You can assign the new citizen tasks yourself or they will choose one by default. By default, they only opt for basic resource collection. If you want to assign them a building to work, you will need to do it yourself but you must ensure that the right person is in the right place.
You will have more efficient resource collectors if they are strong enough to carry more resources during each run. You will also be better off with mine workers who are not afraid of working in dark and closed places. This opens up a new level or micro-managing your town and really works well. You will have a visible difference when you assign the right person for the right job. As the citizens move around, settling in, they will often have some problems with other citizens so you will need to ensure that the citizens are happy and taken care of otherwise the happiness will simply drop and people will start leaving your town.
You can also make your main character stronger by crafting better armor and weapons for it. The enemies in the game will start getting harder for you if you don’t purchase better weapons and armor. Equipping better armor will increase your health and will eventually make you more capable of staying longer in battles without consuming health potions. Better weapons will ensure that your enemies do not stay longer in battles in front of you. HammerHelm might be more focused on exploration and town building but you will notice plenty of RPG elements in the game as well.
Every time you level up, you will earn Skill Points which can be used to upgrade your skills which can be used in combat and exploration. These are passive and will make you stronger, get more loot from dead enemies and more. You can dodge enemy attacks, kick them and even perform heavy attacks to kill them quickly. The combat aspect of HammerHelm needs a little work at this time and could be a lot better but is still in pretty decent shape and you will enjoy it.
HammerHelm is still in the development phase which means that there are some glitches as well. I was playing the game today and after a recent Christmas update, some textures went black for me such as the rocks and stones in caves and dungeons. This is normal for games currently undergoing development and so far I have not encountered any game breaking bug in the game which shows that the development is going pretty smoothly on the title. Visuals hiccups could be fixed as the game approaches its final release date.
In its current form, the game may grow on you and become repetitive after 9, 10 hours of gameplay but the developer promises that the full version of the game will have more enemies, more locations, more quests and more content overall. This means that HammerHelm will be a solid title upon release if everything goes well during its development phase. In its current phase, HammerHelm is still a pretty fun game and can keep you busy for hours as you build and expand your town. We are certainly looking forward to the final version of HammerHelm.
