Warman

I have a soft spot for games that know exactly what they are and refuse to apologize for it. Warman, the solo project from developer Oleg Dammer that spent years in Early Access before its full 2023 release, is one of those games. It does not want to tell you a story. It does not want to present you with a moral dilemma. It wants to put a sword or a bow or a fire staff in your hand and send you into a dungeon. That clarity of purpose is genuinely refreshing, and the question worth asking is whether the execution holds up underneath the stripped-back philosophy. At its structural core, Warman is an isometric hack-and-slash built around persistent hero progression. Each run begins on a hub island where you can kit out and upgrade your gear before heading into the procedurally-generated dungeons that form the game's main content. The world spans 17 interconnected areas across three distinct biomes, mixing handcrafted layouts with procedural generation to keep repeat visits feeling a little different. Enemies scale in difficulty as you push deeper, and the loop of clearing floors, collecting loot, and returning stronger is familiar but functional. The freeform class system is the most interesting design choice here: Archer, Warrior, Bandit, Fire Mage, and Wind Mage each carry a unique skill set and a passive ability tree with 14 nodes to work through, but switching playstyles is as simple as swapping your weapon. Combined with over 50 item modifiers and a Blacksmith reforging system, the build space has real depth for a game of this size. Pushing modifier combinations toward genuinely broken power levels is, per the developer's own framing, very much the point. The co-op side is where Warman has its clearest identity hook. Up to eight players can run dungeons together with full cross-platform multiplayer, and the game's cartoony, colorful visual style holds up reasonably well at a crowded screen. Community feedback has been broadly positive - the Steam reception sits in the "Very Positive" range across roughly 60 user reviews - though some players have noted that the early game can feel rough around the edges, particularly the balance of early enemy types hitting harder than expected for new characters. The community has also flagged questions about content depth over long solo sessions, which is fair: without a narrative thread pulling you forward, the loop's staying power depends almost entirely on whether you find the build-crafting intrinsically satisfying or need external goals to stay engaged. Visually, Warman keeps things clean and readable rather than elaborate. The interface prioritizes clarity over spectacle, which suits the isometric combat well. What the presentation lacks in handcrafted artistry it compensates for in functional legibility - you can parse a chaotic eight-player dungeon run without too much noise. The game's roots in a long Early Access period are occasionally visible in the seams, and launcher stability issues have appeared in community discussions, though these seem to be edge cases rather than widespread problems. If you come into Warman hoping it will carry you with world-building or pacing, you will be disappointed before the first hour is up. But if you treat it as a loot-and-build sandbox with a genuinely flexible class system and solid co-op bones, it rewards the right kind of attention. Solo players who need narrative glue should look elsewhere. Groups of three to eight who want a low-friction dungeon crawler they can actually run together across platforms will find something here that most bigger-budget games in the genre do not offer.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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