Hamilton’s Great Adventure Review

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