By Jim Rossignol on August 14th, 2007 at 7:00 pm.
I’ve just picked up on Hammerfall via the ever-excellent physics-game site Fun Motion, who in turn discovered it on the Russian-language game development forums at GameDev.ru. The game’s hour-long demo was posted as an example of work-in-progress – and it’s looking fairly polished.
Hammerfall’s concept is simple: it’s a 2D weapon-swinging game. However, the weapon swinging is a little offbeat, since you’re the pilot of a steam-powered clockpunk helicopter-thing, which has a weapon dangling from it on a chain. You start out with a rock, and end up with hammers and big shiny switchblades. Using these whirling weapons you have to fight off a series of enemies, swarm shoot ‘em up style. Evil night maggots and airship-eating wasps, as well as other heli-weapon pilots, all mean that mastery of your martial pendulum-device is essential. It made me feel a bit weird, perhaps dizzy in two dimensions, or something.
Hmm, I don’t think my screenshot quite captures the action… Anyway Hammerfall’s tiny skybound fantasy universe is just beautiful and I recommend it to all. As long as you don’t mind being referred to as “The Gaiar” by your weapon-whirling tutors.
25/08/2007 at 09:27 roBurky says:
This was great. I especially liked getting enormo-points for smashing my copter directly into something when unarmed. It made the “Don’t fight! Just evade!” levels very entertaining, even though I kept smashing myself to death over and over again.
But I got stuck on the arena level against two shielded opponents before I’d even finished the demo. I also couldn’t figure out the combining weapons thing.
11/02/2008 at 14:33 Stromko says:
For the sake of my wrists and elbow I really wish Hammerfall had joystick /gamepad control options. It’s also made me hate escort missions all over again, especially when there’s no way to tell how close to death the thing you’re escorting is.