The Hammer, Fighting Not Falling

By: Derek Yu

On: July 27th, 2009

Hammerfall, which was one of my favorites for IGF 2008, has re-emerged as Hammerfight, now with new trailer and website. In the game you fly around in vehicles that can be armed with swords, flails, guns, and other weapons. It’s a gorgeous production, and the physics-based game mechanics are genuinely very inventive and fun.

No release date yet. Thanks to Matthew Wegner and Fun-Motion for the news!

Posted in Physics, Previews, Videos

undertech

Wow this looks pretty awesome.
Cranky

This game is so much fun.
I played through the demo a dozen times already, can’t wait for the final product.
squiz

I want this game, and I want it NOW !!!
Inigo

I hope they keep the dodgy translation from Hammerfall. It made it hard to understand sometimes, but it gave a bit of a surreal atmosphere to the game.
squiz

Oh what the f*cking f*ck…..
The demo wont download in firefox or ie8
*cries*
Nick

Reminds me ever so slightly of Ragdoll Masters. Just the idea of controlling a single point and trying to swing something around it to damage other people. Except this game has some amazing graphics to go along with it.
squiz

OK never mind its downloading, I guess the website must be taking a hammering (pun fully intended)….
AaronP

To anyone trying to download the video:

If you “Change to Eng” You will not be able to download the demo, even if you click the flag link. You must keep the website at default language, and then you will be able to download the demo. And it fuggin rocks!
http://chaoseed.com/garden John Evans

I guess Fall Games was upset about the original title.

(I’m joking…I hope.)
MisterX

Hammerfall sounds a great lot more interesting than Hammerfight. From the latter I’d expect some kind of ridiculous, overly violent two player competitive Mario game.

Anyway, I still have the beta version of Hammerfall and it is brillant. It’s good that it’s finally nearing completion and I guess there’s no doubt that it’s going to be a hit.
mots

I remember playing the game a while ago.. but this trailer could be much better… it’s a little confusing, it seems like it,s too zoomed in and the characters blend in too much with the backgrounds….
CogDissident

Welcome to hammerfall Mots, thats how the game “normally” is. In anything more than 3 characters on screen, the game is a bit of a mess. Still fun, but a mess visually.
http://0xdeadc0de.org Eclipse

the “music” of this trailer hurt my feelings.
Xander

Haha, it still looks awesome. Damn I’ve been pining for this game for a while now.. the scene with the clouds and that massive boss contraption had me excited the most.
Lorne Whiting

I did like old name better :[

Either way, I loved the demo way back when.

If it’s still the same demo on their new site, you could actually get rid of the demo timer and play through until you hit an unbeatable level (about 30-45 minutes further in than where the demo will usually end) by playing until the timer expires, deleting the game with the expired timer, and starting a new one in its place. :)
Nikica

Finally some news of this awesome game, can’t wait for the full version. One of theb est physics games EVER!
havchr

looks amazingly great.
Dominic White

I preferred the old name, but HURRAH! HAMMERFALL IS BACK!

Seriously, I loved the demo of the old version, but then it mysteriously went silent – not even any posts on the Russian game-dev forum where it was unveilied.

The game has a ton of subtlety and depth. It may feel like wild flailing at first, but put in a few hours and you’ll be able to surgically strike pretty much anything with crushing power. Disarming enemies is fun.
Captain Beefheart

SHIT YES. SO glad to hear it’s still coming. I played the balls off the demo. Despite that it was unfinished it still sits in there as one of the most satisfying games I’ve ever played. It’s probably just that I’m hardgay for mouse controlled physics based combat, but delivering a solid hit just felt damn good.
MisterX

@Lorne Whiting
This is a new demo, and it’s quite different from the old version. I think it plays a bit nicer and the levels seem to be all new. Also, seemingly there’s no more fighting awkward wasps, but flying jigsaws instead, yay.
Eponymouse

In addition to being a damn awesome game (judging by the old beta), the atmosphere and setting of this is great.
Influenza

This is why we shouldn’t pay attention to the russians; They write books, we translate them, then we find out they are better than our books and cry. They make games, we translate them, then find out they are better than our books and cry.
P Trousers

Wasps are still there, you just took different route.
zacaj

I think the old name was better. Great game though.
Tomidimus

Strangely enough changing the language to English on the site only changes about 5% of all text on the site. :P
MisterX

@P Trousers
Different routes? Cool! Couldn’t tell due to not understanding a word of Russian. Is the demo which was uploaded at Fun-Motion in English?
Oddwalz

Hammerfall is the name of a Swedish Metal group, may possibly explain the name change.

I agree though, liked the original name a lot more.
Victo

Pretty funny post title :D
P Trousers

MrX,

After you defeat the very first dude you get this: http://a.imagehost.org/0144/Hammerfight20.png

In 1 you must survive the worm attack twice and then defend some guy from the wasps.
2 is the one you choose, apparently.
Both are followed by the night fight with the big tentacly thing.
Rockvillian

This is pretty awesome…..

But the title could be way better. They should hold a contest to see who can come up with the better name!
MisterStone

This game is loads of fun, has great level designs, and as an added bonus the aesthetics are beautiful. I love all the tiny people, banners, streamers, wooden constructions… everything is beautiful in this game. And apparently multi-mouse support is in, which means multi-player support! Win on all fronts!
MisterX

@P Trousers
Ah, I see, thanks. At the time I thought it was just some kind of world map, with level 1 being the one I had just played before.

On that note, I thought that it was strange how extremely short nearly all of the levels are. There are rarely different stages or so, but rather you’re just thrown into a battle against a bunch of enemies, defeat them in about 1 to 5 minutes and proceed to the next level.
Considering how lengthy the beta demo was, I can only guess that it’s because the demo levels are so early and later levels get longer. At least I hope so.
namuol

I played this a year or so ago. It was very fun, although often frustrating.

‘definitely gonna give it another try, with hope that they’ve made the controls a little tighter.
turmoil

i have to be honest, this looked better during IGF 2008… now it seems kinda, monotonous and looks like it’ll be more frustrating than fun.
MisterX

How so? I definitely see the danger of it becoming repetitive because the combat is actually very simple. But, things like the loads of different weapons, improving these weapons with gems, combining the weapons, and generally improving your craft might make for enough motivation.
But, why do you think it’d be frustrating? I only felt like that when I played the beta demo, as I crashed into the enemy instead of hitting him with my weapon far too frequently. But, either because I’ve improved or because the game has, I didn’t have that problem with the new demo. I don’t really have any gripe about the combat. It feels and controls great and there seems to be a nice amount of variety with the weapons and obtaining them.
ngajoe

I’m not very good at point and click adventure games–needless to say, I can’t figure out what the heck to do to start the game. I can spin my mouse, fill up the bar, and click on the blinking ‘+’ boxes in the circle windows (that I think are yet-to-be-implemented modes), but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to start the game… there’s no button for me to press on ‘solo’ mode :(
Nikica

@ngajoe: You have to press one of those ‘+’ bokes, :D! Oh and I must say that the demo is too short.
ngajoe

Dang…it just sits there saying “??????e ???” or something to that effect…
Rockvillian

ngajoe, either press enter there to register as “INCOGNITO” or backspace to enter your name :)
MisterX

Does anyone with a bit more experience with the game know if the balance of the weapons is any good? I get the impression that nothing beats a flail, the longer the chain the better, and I found that combining weapons so that they’re on the same “axsis” is utterly useless. Blades seem to do nice damage if you manage to “slice” the enemy, but hardly seem to do any damage against armor. Also, considering how short the swords are, getting that close to the enemy usually results in yourself crashing into the enemy, especially with all the speech bubbles and effects on the screen which make it hard to make out how close you are to the enemy at times. When I combined different blades or hammers I also found that it gets a lot harder to properly control they’re power, and considering how strong the flail is I didn’t find use for that, anyway.
Any ideas on that?
hand model

Was anyone else disgusted by the intro? I don’t want to see a zoomed in clip of a ham fist moving a crusty mouse.
MS

I tried to edit the config file so that it would not render blur or smoke, since my machine can’t handle more than a couple of enemies. But it doesn’t seem to be working? Has anyone else managed to do this?

Also, has anyone done anything else to improve performance only?
eobet

Is there, or will there be an OS X version?
Kalleria

MS, I can turn them off just fine. It might be case-sensitive, make sure you put in “false”, no quotes of course. GFX_RENDER_SMOKE/BLUR/SHAKE, DBG_RENDER_BODY_GLARE/ENERGY/GLOW/FX (NOT LIGHT) and GFX_BLOOM are all pretty safe to turn off, although keep in mind that poison uses smoke effects. Also, I seem to get better FPS in fullscreen mode for some reason. I’ll get back to you if I manage to lower the resolution properly.
Kalleria

Hmmm, it seems TIGS comments don’t like underscores. Well, I think I got my point across well enough.