THOR'S HAMMER

As in ages past, the shadow of a great evil falls across our homeland.  In a trial that marks the passing of an age, a champion must once again take up the legendary Thor's Hammer to quell the encroaching darkness.

Soon you will find yourself gripped in an adventure of mythic proportions.  Indeed, even now a messanger prepares to ride in search of you.  I only hope that there is time yet to study carefully the information gathered here and to arm yourself with its knowledge.  It will surely be of use to you on your quest.

Our situation is grave, young warrior, and it is in desperation that our village turns to you.  Take with you the wisdom contained in these pages and the prayers of the dwarven people.

~ from the manual documentation

The shareware scene was awash with pseudo 3D shooters in the mid-90s thanks to the popularity of Doom and Wolfenstein 3D. Some even used the impressive-for-the-time engines to create ambitious role-playing games. That's what Empire Programming aimed for in 1995 with Thor's Hammer.

Being from a small independent developer with no publishing contract, Thor's Hammer has almost disappeared into obscurity. I first came to know the shareware version on one of those multi-game compilation CDs filled with hundreds of them including freeware games and other demos. Everyone with a PC had at least one of these back then, and no-one knew how they got them. They simply materialised in your game collection as if they always had been there. The one I remembered had Catacombs and Ken's Labyrinth along with Thor's Hammer (and 997 more if its cover blurb is to be believed) to make up its 3D action section, but I remember playing a demo of The Lion King the most. It is now gone from my collection as mysteriously as it came. Spooky.

Village monks will give you quests. Complete it and they might reward you with a new spell!

Anyway, tangent aside, Thor's Hammer is a simple first-person RPG that plays more like a hack-and-slash FPS. The full version is separated into three parts but the first, which was playable in full on that CD, is the best. It features a hub world of sorts with a village of monks telling you where to go next. This feature is sadly absent in the next two chapters which are completely linear, but that's not to say you have much freedom of movement. At the start, you cannot leave the village until a monk gives you a mission to travel to the caves in the north and kill an orc king. Other monks won't even give you the time of day until other dungeons are complete but it's a nevertheless good inclusion in a game otherwise lacking in immersion.

The dungeons themselves play more like a FPS than anything, except without the shooting. You begin with only an axe requiring you to get near to your enemies. Later on, you'll get a limited number of reusable throwing axes that you have to retrieve after each time they're used. You can also get spells, but they are tied to your magic bar with drains a little too quickly for my liking. Combat hasn't exactly been programmed well, with hit boxes tied to the square grid you're standing on and not your actual size. This means projectiles can seemingly fly past you and still hit. Attacks, whether they are coming from enemies or yourself, appear to have randomly decided hit rate. You can swing your axe right next to an opponent and not hit, yet a swing off to the side does. I guess this simulates the roll of a dice on a table-top RPG, but in an action-heavy game such as this it feels wrong.

Ladders mark the entrance to a dungeon, or a different area if inside one (left).
Switches will open doors or raise bridges to reveal new paths (right).

While the over-world looks nice, if a little dated even for 1995, the dungeons are a series of bland caves and corridors which mostly look the same. Even the rare room that has obviously had more time spent on its look doesn't help. Grey rock is still grey, and brown is still the colour of mud. You have to search these caverns for switches and keys to get to the end where a boss (a.k.a. a palate-swapped standard enemy) is usually waiting. You do get a reward, whether instant or delayed, but you still have to backtrack your way out again.

Our nameless hero's ultimate goal is to find the Norse god's infamous hammer. You will even get to wield it eventually, but it controls much the same way as the standard axe. The game can be played entirely with the mouse or keyboard, but I found a combination of the two played best. This is not the normal mouse-keyboard combo you'll find in modern games, but something a little different. The arrow keys moves our character while holding Alt allows him to strafe. Shift speeds him up, but he has good speed anyway so I rarely used it. Ctrl swings your hammer while Enter throws a hammer.

They controls cannot be changed in-game, but I did use the DOSBox mapper play with a X-Box controller (left).
The self-revealing map is very useful to find your way around. It's a shame there isn't on for the dungeons (right).

When you have spells, F1-F5 activates them. This was a bit too awkward for my liking so I found using the mouse to be best. The magical list is displayed on the left hand side and you can click on them to use them. Being ranged attacks or defensive spells, it's not as awkward to use and you can get used to it after a while. It's easy to put a good distance between you and your target giving you ample time to switch to the mouse and go casting. You'll need to use it for the map and menu screens on the left hand side anyway, so you might as well use it for this. Should you want to forgo the keyboard entirely, it's possible; arrows will appear on the game screen which can be clicked on to move and opening a chest is as easy as a brief compression of your forefinger. While not exactly broken, its a control scheme entirely designed for an RPG. In the more hectic moments of this action heavy game, it gets frustratingly cumbersome.

Thor's Hammer was a fun find in the mounds of self-extracting exe files found deep within the simple text-based install menus of a shareware CD. This version doesn't overstay its welcome and contains the best the trilogy has to offer, which in all honesty isn't much. The full game is overly simple, a little glitchy and under-designed yet manages to teeter on the right side of playable. An ancient curio if ever there was one.

To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses the DOSBox-X build of DOSBox to bring the game to modern systems. Manual included. Read the ChamberNotes.txt for more detailed information. Tested on Windows 10.

File Size: 22.4 Mb.  Install Size: 49.9 Mb.  Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ

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Thor's Hammer Trilogy is © Empire Programming
Review, Cover Design and Installer created by me

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