E3 Preview: Project H.A.M.M.E.R.

As cool as the three Wii Remote attacks are, one thing I'm really excited about is the way that Project H.A.M.M.E.R. handled "locking-on" to enemies. Much like The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Super Mario Galaxy, there is always a cursor on screen. In Twilight Princess, it took the form of a fairy, much like Navi, which you might remember from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. In Super Mario Galaxy, it's a star with a brightly colored trail behind it. Both of these worked very well, didn't get annoying (as I thought they might), and were relatively unobtrusive. Project H.A.M.M.E.R.'s cursor is much the same way.

The cursor is a semi-transparent, but brightly colored red circle. Size-wise it was a bit larger than the main character, M-09's, head on-screen, which was just large enough to be effective, but not so big that it gets in your way. There's a red trail behind it as well, which helps you easily locate it on-screen. You move it around on screen with the Wii Remote. Every time the cursor is on an enemy or destructible object, that object/baddie becomes highlighted and is noticeably red. When this happens, you can press the B button, which will lock onto the currently selected enemy.


Once locked-on, you are always facing that enemy (until you take him out or release your lock), allowing you to circle strafe around it with the control stick and target your attacks. I'm not sure if any of your basic A attacks (or any others) change while locked-on. In any case though, after a few moments of actually using the feature, locking on becomes just as easy to do as anything else. In many ways, it's a lot more intuitive than many of today's standard controller current lock-on techniques. You simply point at the enemy you want and select it. It quickly becomes easy to do this right in the midst of battle.

Locking onto enemies can be a smart or dumb thing do, depending on your skill level. On one occasion, one of Nintendo's booth representatives told me not to lock onto enemies, because "everyone dies when they do that." After nodding in blind agreement, I ignored her and continued to explore the technique. She wasn't happy about that and actually half tried to reteach me how to "not" use the lock-on feature. Based on this I'm assuming that not a lot of people who played the demo fully understood the use of the lock-on. It definitely can hurt you if you use it at the wrong times, just like any game, but for those who learn the strategy behind it, the technique opens up a lot of depth and is a welcome addition to the game.


Project H.A.M.M.E.R. featured at least four types of enemy robots in its E3 demo. However, calling them "types" or "different" is almost a stretch. Every enemy was a bipedal robot that attacked only by walking toward you and mindlessly flailing its arms forward. The larger ones took more hits to take down and some seemed a bit faster than others, but none showed any signs of intelligence. The game is only difficult due to the increasing numbers of robots thrown at you. It's kind of like fighting zombies. So in that respect, the demo left much to be desired. Yet, there were some hints at things to come.

In the middle of the demo, your path down an alleyway is blocked by three mounted flamethrowers. To take them out, you have to time your Power Slam properly, crushing them. This would be easy except for the whole flame thing. It will be interesting to see if the final game travels further in this direction and features environmental puzzles. It would definitely add some variation to the gameplay and spice things up.

Near the end of the demo you're pitted against a robot-generating drill that emerges from the ground and continually produces new grunt robots to attack you. I believe it produces about four at a time if I remember right. The trick here is to ignore the robots as best you can and focus your attention solely on the generator itself. This was also a welcome diversion.

Finally, after defeating the generator, you head down an alleyway and the demo ends with a cutscene. Rounding a corner roughly a block away is a two-legged mech with one a pretty hefty gun on top of it. In a way, it kind of resembled an ATST (chicken walker) from Star Wars, but with a large missile launcher atop a rounded head. The machine shoots a missile at you and the demo ends. The possibility of fighting against enemies with missiles and guns is particularly interesting. There is no jump feature in the game (at this time), so dodging projectile attacks would rest solely on simple running and C/Z dashing. One cool possibility that could be fun is if your hammer can deflect projectiles back at attackers. There are a lot of fun possibilities.