Hammerting

A fiddly take on management, survival and city building that you can still lose a weekend to.

Hammerting is an incredibly wasted opportunity for a high-quality simulator. Everything in the game feels like an unfinished idea. Why don’t the dwarves use their brains? Why do you have to manage every single element? It’s chaos—confusing, glowing, colorful, and hidden deep within a mountain—and it wouldn’t matter if it stayed buried there forever. Except for the music; I already have that on my playlist, because if I’m going to starve to death, I might as well do it in style.

Prepare pickaxes, pour beer and cheer for digging! The dwarf village will not stand on its own and you will enjoy it.

Hammerting meets the bar for a good colony sim but still has a few kinks to work out regarding the story and the overworld engagement.

Hammerting is a good example of how solid individual mechanics sometimes fail to offer more than the sum of their parts in terms of gameplay. The development team has put together an interesting dwarf clan simulation and management title. It has even created an engaging if derivative universe for the player to interact with.

Hammerting is a promising but overly micromanaged dwarf colony builder. While its concept—crafting a mountain fortress to fuel wartime trade—is intriguing, the game struggles with clunky AI, overcomplicated systems, and overwhelming micromanagement. Despite charm and clever ideas, it lacks the polish or balance to fully deliver on its potential.

Hammerting’s level of character detail and large, explorable areas offer promise for those who love resource management and base-building games. The graphics and concept hold up, and the game runs well. Adding combat, trade, exploration, and an overworld mechanic with faction relationships to a colony sim is a major undertaking that will pay off well if the systems can become fully integrated. However, the game is not polished enough to deliver a dependable experience, and despite its scope, it offers few new ideas to make it memorable. Developers promise more quality of life improvements, but being a small team, the modding community may have to take up the slack as they did with RimWorld. Thankfully, modding is encouraged in C++. Time will tell if Hammerting is a diamond in the rough, or whether it becomes buried under its own ambition.

Hammerting is a little rough around the edges in some aspects of the gameplay. The annoying AI of the dwarfs can be off-putting when you are playing the game. The devs seem very active on the discussion thread on Steam so I would imagine they have taken note of players concerns on some aspects of the gameplay. It isn’t a terrible game, it just needs a little more work to make it a thoroughly enjoyable playing experience for the player.

Hammerting is a good exponent of modern colony management titles. A certain amount of grinding and some HUB problems are its weak points, but it will still give you many hours of gameplay.

Hammerting is definitely not free of problems and serrations. Starting with the AI, it really needs a push. With some refinement it could become a much more intriguing title.