The first Hammerwatch ran perfectly only when lighting was disabled. With every setting at min/off except for lighting it lags every so often; as soon as lighting is disabled it runs at a stable 60 fps (capped) reguardless of other graphics settings.

Update: turns out for some reason my laptop "throttles" my cpu down to absurd frequencies; and coincidentally, in the first game with all graphics settings turned off, it just so happens to be enough for at least 30 FPS in-game @ 480 MHz - 650 MHz x 2.

Normally, the cpu would operate at 79.95x31 (2.5 GHz x 2), which is more than enough (for HWR) on Ubuntu 16.04 with the updated liqorix kernal and on the Fluxbox desktop environment on cpu-freq performance mode on all cores.

In the meantime I hope the graphics options can be tweaked more like in the first game, so that if I can't find a solution i'll have a small workaround.

If you need more info (logs, i7z cpu-mult info, benchmarks, settings, etc) just ask :)
Any help of anykind (linux cpu throttle info, general perf help, etc) is appreciated.