The game is beautiful and enjoyoable in the first few tries. But it gets repetitive fast. You can skill your hero and upgrade your town only after dying, which makes progress quite cumbersome. And while the levels are randomly generated, there is no feeling of variety. Ultimately, I cannot recommend this game for that price tag at the moment, as it gets too old, too quickly.

Heroes of Hammerwatch II is a massive improvement on the original game. The game is significantly less of a grind this time around, and the primary progression resource in the first game, is split into multiple resources here allowing you to make improvements to your town essentially every run. The environments feel fresher, and transition to one another in a more natural way - they're also slightly smaller making the repetition of running through them less taxing. I never played co-op in the first game, but loved it here and made great memories with some friends. Overall, I had a great time and it would probably be my game of the year so far (I haven't played much, but also this is great).

That being said, it is still missing some positive features the first game had, and struggles in some ways. You still receive permanent stats to all your characters for leveling up each class, but the Rogue's bonus of decreased trap damage feels pretty worthless. If you're a good player you're already avoiding the traps, or can spend gold to disable them; evasion chance, critical chance, resource gain, etc. all would've had more impact. A missing feature is the ability to make your runs more challenging for the potential of increased resources, items, larger maps, stronger enemies, and other modifiers. Taking shortcuts throughout runs doesn't provide enough in the way of items - running through all the environments hunting out secret rooms feels like the necessary strategy if you're going for the win. Lastly, the scaling still feels wonky once you get deeper into NG+ runs; the number of viable strategies decreases significantly, and the level cap feels like it could be adjusted for a smoother experience through the first NG+ runs.

Overall, Heroes of Hammerwatch II is a wonderful game. Improvements to the meta progression system make progress come significantly faster, and the increased detail to the environments give the game much more life. I've played Heroes of Hammerwatch II less than I played it's predecessor, but feel that I experienced more, and had much more fun in that time, there's no longer a wall you run into where progress becomes a slow grind. It thrives as a co-op experience, and stays mostly true to what made the original great. There are improvements they can make, and I hope they continue to improve the base game before selling any DLC. Regardless, I've had a great time with Heroes of Hammerwatch II, it's been my favorite 2025 release thus far.

Highly Recommended

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The graphics are a definite improvement, but its hard to say that Heroes of Hammerwatch 2 is better or even as good as the first title.

The classes don't feel quite as tightly designed as they did in the first one. The addition of the equipment layer is a neat touch but stopping to compare items you find really breaks up the "flow" you could get into in the first title. Overall it feels slower and less rewarding, while somehow also seeming to be shorter on content. The town is needlessly large, nearly 4-5x the size of the first town's hub and key vendors/shops/npcs are scattered all over the otherwise empty hub. As you advance into NG+, many classes/prestige classes prove themselves to be completely useless in comparison to a few key "meta" choices (the only choices that actually work). There are also some bugs that seem to have persisted for months which completely break some classes/playstyles (such as minions dying when you change maps).

I can't really recommend the second title over the first one, at least not yet, not even after 11 patches.