Hamilton’s
Great Adventure would be more suitably titled Hamilton and Sasha’s
Mediocre Action Puzzler. However, there are some aspects of it which
are quite good. Unfortunately, game play is not among these. Ernest
Hamilton is a stocky, vaguely Conquistadorian rendition of Indiana
Jones and Sasha is his faithful tropical bird sidekick. Together they
race through sixty or so trap-laden mazes in four different exotic
regions of the globe. As such mazes are wont to do, they start out
childishly easy for the first dozen or so, then ramp up to mildly
challenging by the end.

This is a console platform game, really, except it was released to
PC first for some unfathomable reason. It’s odd because what the game
most resembles is some souped up Nintendo title from the Nineties.
Paging Mario.
There is nothing to it except those sixty odd mazes. Hamilton doesn’t
jump or do anything other than run through the maze, collecting tokens
and treasure and keys until he reaches the final tile and exits. Sasha
is a separately controlled character who does double duty collecting
loot herself and helping Ham deal with some of the bad guys and other
obstacles he encounters in his trips around the brightly colored tiles.

Ironically,
the puzzles are snooze-inducingly easy while the learning curve for
the game’s controls is rather steep. The WASD keys control Ham while
the mouse and its buttons control Sasha. But there is a whole slew
of other keys which need to be pushed just so you can see what’s going
on in the level. Zoom in, zoom out, rotate left, rotate right, activate
door, etc. All of this button pushing and mouse wheeling keeps you
quite busy on these timed runs, but all the activity simply adds up
to irritation. It’s more like learning a complex dance routine than
solving a puzzle. Now, of course, that is what an action game is,
kinetics and aesthetics. I get that. Except I still don’t understand
what’s entertaining about it.

So why do they call it Hamilton’s Great Adventure? Are the
publishers trying to lure the legions of adventure gamers to their
platformer? Unlikely. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this
game is that there is a rather charming adventure story taking place
during it. Alas, it occurs entirely during the animated comic book
cut scenes between levels. All you get to do is watch it, not play
it.

The
graphics and the production are both outstanding. I thought the look
of the game was terrific, and I encountered no real problems playing
it. Other, of course, than that my laptop was woefully underpowered
for it. I had to turn off the very nice jaunty music entirely, I had
to shrink the game window down to 640 x 480 and turn off every other
graphics bell and whistle I could turn off. Even so, the game ran
sluggishly on my year-old machine. I had to download the massive game
trailer simply to see how the game is supposed to look and play. No
doubt playing Ham’s Great Adventure at full processor speed is indeed
more enjoyable, but the fastest Nvidia card in existence won’t juice
up those repetitive, tedious mazes.

The game does try to inject some new obstacles with each new continent
visited, but it helps the game play only marginally. This game is
strictly for that breed of gamer who likes to practice and practice
and practice until he or she can run up a great score and then use
the in-game button to boast about it to friends. Since the only way
to “solve” each of the more elaborate levels is through
trial-and-error, it means restarting and restarting and restarting
until you can execute the intricate dance steps correctly.

Hamilton’s
Great Adventure is conspicuously not an adventure game but it
is lovely to look at and is well-made and probably would amuse a child
with access to a very powerful computer. For those of us who prefer
to think our way through a game, whether adventure or puzzle, we will
once again have to sojourn elsewhere.

Graphics: A; Music: B, Production: A, Game Play: D. Which adds
up to an overall C plus. Nice to look at, dull to play.

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows Vista / Windows 7 (Note: will not run on XP)
• Processor: Dual Core 2.4GHz processor
• Memory: 2GB
• Hard Disk Space: 1GB
• Video Card: Shader 4.0 compatible card (minimum: Nvidia GeForce
  8xxx, AMD Radeon 2xxx)
• DirectX®: Direct3D 11