Ugh, jeez... Hammerfight. *slow drawn-out sigh*
Premise Hammerfight is a 2D arcade-style game where you fly around in a steampunk trashcan trying to hit another trashcan with your flail. You have a freaking medieval weapon hanging of your flying trashcan. Read that sentence a few more times. Go on, I'll wait. It sounds exactly like something Robert Brockway would come up with. I picked this game up in the third Humble Indie Bundle pack, and at first, I thought it was going to be great. It's such an amazingly original idea, and I wish I could say the game is blast to play, has a wacky sense of humour, and is ridiculously fun. But it isn't. Gameplay and Mechanics The the game is entirely controlled with the mouse. Not the mouse buttons either, just the movement of the mouse. Which means the game where you fly around in trashcans and hit each other with flails is pseudo-physics based. And it just doesn't work. In order to move, you have to swipe your mouse in the direction you want to go, and in order to bring your weapon to bear, you must swirl your mouse around madly in a circle, and this turns into an absolute nightmare. Building up momentum for your flail is hard, and it's nearby impossible to swipe the mouse while boring a donut-shaped grove in your mousepad, which is a fancy way of saying you can't move and attack at the same time. This is a massive problem because your AI opponents can. Since they aren't bogged down with atrociously awful controls, they can whiz up to you and bring down their brand of flail-based justice with very little effort. And because they're darting all over the place, it makes smacking them extremely difficult. Especially if you lose momentum and have to start again. You have to smack them the right way, too. If they're below you, you have to ensure your flail is whirling clockwise to smack them back down. If above, counter-clockwise to smack them back up. And as I said, you can't be mobile and on the offensive at the same time, so often you're sitting there with your flail whirling madly around, while the opponent either waits or gets into a move advantageous position. Art, Sound and Visual Design The art in general is alright, but the 3D parts (where it shows a person's head talking) have that old, cartoonish 3D feel (kinda like those old Firefly games - Space Colony and Stronghold in particular) but it looks terrible. It looks like it's done on a zero budget, and suffers for it.