February 3, 2024 - Day 399 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 435

Game: Hammerting

Platform: Steam
Released: Nov 17, 2021
Installed: Feb 2, 2024
Unplayed: 1d
Playtime: 25m

Rating: 1 - Nope

Hammerting is a 2.5D Dwarven mining colony sim.

I know this, because after 25 minutes of playing, I quit, and searched the web to find out what it was I was trying to play.

It feels like there's actually a reasonable game in there somewhere, but it didn't click with me, because of the way it introduced the game mechanics.

Hammerting starts by pausing the game during the "tutorial", and lighting up a bit of the screen with a popup that says "This does [x]". You then hit Next, and it repeats until it runs out of things to tell you. Sometimes it tells you quite a lot of things one after the other.

Presented like this, these things are abstracted away from their purpose, and with ADHD and not taking my meds on a weekend, it was a lot to try and fail to take in.

Even when I did manage to take something in, the UX was frequently inscrutable, with no system to give me any idea what I was looking at.

You start the game with three dwarves, and you can click on a button, and click on an item in the environment to get them to do something.

Click the mining button. Click on the copper ore. The dwarves mine the ore. The ore falls out of the wall.

The ore sits on the ground. The dwarves do nothing with it. It has a right click menu, but none of the options have anything to do with picking up the ore.

Then my hardy band of dwarves got attacked by a rampaging slime. They killed it in short order. Pieces of slime on the ground. They apparently have value, based on the tooltip.

No idea how to collect them.

The final straw was about 10 minutes later, when I thought I might be starting to get the hang of something, maybe, and the dwarves were attacked again by slimes.

The dwarves stood there, resolutely, being attacked.

I clicked on the attack button, and clicked the slimes.

The dwarves stood there, resolutely, being attacked.

I clicked to move the dwarves, they moved out of range of the slimes.

The slimes followed until they reached the dwarves.

The dwarves stood there, resolutely, being attacked.

One was knocked unconscious.

I quit the game in frustration.

Hammerting?

1: Nope

#Hammerting #Mining #ColonySim #Gaming #ProjectONG