Given my physical stature and my tendency to let my beard grow unchecked for months at a time, I often jokingly refer to myself among friends as “king of the Dwarves.” Thus, when I learned about HammerHelm’s existence, I felt compelled to try it out. “Perhaps I’ve finally found the game that lets me truly be the king of the Dwarves,” I thought when launching HammerHelm for the first time. To my delight, it seems I’m right about that. I shall now transcribe my thoughts on HammerHelm while sitting contentedly upon my Dwarven throne (also known as my computer chair).

In HammerHelm’s story, you’re a Dwarf who hails from the titular HammerHelm clan. The king of the Dwarves, Buulloar, left the clan’s mountain stronghold on a secret mission and hasn’t been seen for centuries. With the king gone, the unity of the HammerHelm clan has deteriorated. You decide to propose a radical idea to the council that was appointed to rule in the king’s absence: What if the HammerHelm clan were to leave its mountain stronghold and establish a colony above ground? The council needed time to consider your proposal and come to a decision. You’ve been eagerly awaiting their announcement.

The council just so happens to issue their judgment right when you start a new run of HammerHelm. After creating your character, your first objective is to talk to your friend Drix the Weaponsmith. Drix has some troubling news: Not only has the council rejected your proposal to move above ground, but they also want to banish you from the mountain fortress for suggesting something so preposterous and being a “bad influence.” However, the council will not prevent any of your fellow Dwarves from joining you, nor will they harm your friends or anyone else who wants to follow you.

So, you and your first couple of settlers head out, the knowledge that you’ll probably never be welcomed back home weighing heavily on your minds and hearts. You’ll have to try and shake off that sentimentality quickly, though – your new colony isn’t going to build and run itself. In HammerHelm, you’ll serve as both your new colony’s leader and a more stereotypical high-fantasy adventurer. You’ll be laying out plans for new buildings in the colony one minute and off on a quest to kill some nearby encroaching goblins the next. Quite a few bog-standard RPG elements are present in HammerHelm.

You have health, stamina, and experience bars, and you’ll level up whenever you earn enough experience points from various sources. By default, you can dodge-roll, sprint, and block incoming attacks (if you have a shield equipped). Sprinting and attacking do not consume stamina, but dodging and blocking do. You can choose to either only sprint while holding down the corresponding button or toggle permanent sprinting on. I’m always glad to see the ability to toggle permanent sprinting on and off, and even happier to see that sprinting doesn’t consume your finite stamina. Those are both points in HammerHelm’s favor for me.

Whenever you build a new house in your colony, you’ll get to pick from a small selection of Dwarves who will join your colony and inhabit that new house. Each Dwarf you can allow to join you has certain traits you’ll see before you officially welcome them into your colony. These traits are standard fare if you’re familiar with similar colony-management games. To name a few examples, some Dwarves might be more or less resistant to getting sick. Others might gather resources faster because they enjoy doing manual labor. Still others might need their clothes replaced more or less often.

Of course, as your colony grows, you’ll need places where your townsfolk can both work and relax. As you might expect, you ideally want to make sure you have enough workplaces and housing built to ensure all your Dwarves can live comfortably while pulling their weight to support the colony. You can place new buildings via HammerHelm’s building menu. Here, you’re given an aerial view of your land and a grid that helps you make sure each building has enough space. This menu also lets you build road networks to connect all your buildings.

Before you place any new building in this menu, HammerHelm will tell you exactly what you need to have that new structure built. This includes raw materials, gold, and any prerequisite buildings you might need to have in place first. For example, even if you have enough gold and raw materials, you can’t build a water well until you’ve built a stonemason’s shop and assigned at least one Dwarf to work there. I’m glad that HammerHelm’s implementation of this gameplay mechanic is so straightforward and intuitive. Beyond that, HammerHelm only applies restrictions to building placement that make practical sense.

You can’t overlap any buildings (though you can overlap roads), and you can’t build mines in places where there will be no ore deposits to mine from them, for example. Other than that, you have a lot of freedom in deciding which buildings will go where. I’m always glad to see colony-management and city-builder games grant their players this much leeway to do things as they see fit. I don’t mind having restrictions placed on what sorts of things I can do, so long as said restrictions aren’t ridiculous. I’d say HammerHelm nails it on both of those fronts.

The topic of building new structures brings me to one aspect of HammerHelm I dislike, however. I mentioned that opening HammerHelm’s build menu gives you an aerial view of your colony. My issue with this is that the camera seems to be zoomed out much more by default than it should be, and even adjusting the zoom levels doesn’t seem to help very much. I also sometimes have trouble distinguishing buildings from the environment. I’ve often had difficulty planning out exactly where I want each new building to go because of these factors, even with the building-planning grid.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this only gives me trouble because of my poor eyesight and total lack of depth perception. I would ordinarily criticize HammerHelm’s developers for not considering this potentially widespread accessibility concern, if not for one aspect of HammerHelm that has greatly impressed me. I’m not sure how large of a development team might have worked on HammerHelm, but it seems SuperSixStudios is remarkably receptive to community feedback. It appears that’s especially true when it comes to diagnosing and fixing bugs that players have reported to the developers. I’m rather pleasantly shocked by what I’ve seen on this front.

Early on during my time with HammerHelm, I encountered a bug where an NPC to whom I needed to turn in a completed quest abruptly disappeared right when I went to click on them. I discovered that the NPC in question was now hovering high above me, leaving me with no way to reach them and properly complete the quest they had given me. I thought I had reached an impassible obstacle, but I did a cursory online search and was surprised to find a post about my exact issue on HammerHelm’s Steam forums.

HammerHelm’s lead developer personally commented on that post, helped a player diagnose and temporarily fix the bug, and explained how a then-upcoming patch was likely to fix the issue for anyone else who had experienced it. I was able to fix my instance of the bug in question by saving my progress and relaunching HammerHelm. Considering HammerHelm isn’t exactly a hugely popular game, I wasn’t expecting to find any solutions at all, let alone evidence that the development studio genuinely cares this much about providing the best possible experience for HammerHelm players. I sorely wish that were more common among larger game developers and publishers.

To summarize, I can easily recommend HammerHelm to you if you’re a fan of similar colony-management games. That’s especially true if you enjoy high fantasy settings and want to be a more active leader as opposed to the kind who just sits on a throne, delegates everything to underlings, and signs decrees now and then. HammerHelm does still have some potential accessibility concerns, possibly more than the few I mentioned here. If that could be problematic for you, I’d suggest looking further into HammerHelm before making a purchase decision either way. Otherwise, I’m confident you’ll enjoy leading a colony of Dwarves as much as I do.

A PC review key for HammerHelm was provided by SOEDESCO for this review.

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HammerHelm

$14.99

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Really well-implemented core gameplay mechanics.
• Well-executed high fantasy setting.
• Interesting central plot.
• Core gameplay loop is easy to learn.

Cons

• Potential accessibility concerns in certain areas.
• Strange bugs and glitches may sometimes occur.