Developer: FatShark
Publisher: FatShark
Release Date: Out Now
Players/Online features: Singleplayer, same screen co-op
Words By:
Hamilton’s Great Adventure is a puzzle platformer in which you play as Ernest Hamilton, accompanied by his bird companion, Sasha. The gameplay itself is accompanied by comic book-like cut-scenes, as an older Ernest Hamilton tells the stories of his adventures to his granddaughter, and it is these stories which you play through.
The story starts with the Fluxatron, an item found by the Professor and Hamilton to help them find the lost continent, which has been stolen. As any keen adventurer would, Hamilton goes off in search of it. During his adventures to regain the Fluxatron, Hamilton will travel to four places, Amazon Jungle, Himalayas, Egypt and Maralidia. Each area has a different theme, and the graphics and background music, even the platforms the levels are made of, change accordingly to correspond to the theme.
Each area has 11 main story levels, with you having to at least complete the previous one in order to unlock the next. The last level in each area is a ‘Guardian Challenge’ which is pretty much just an extra tough level, but with a Guardian at the end instead of an exit gate. Each area also has some optional levels which are unlocked when the required amount of treasure points is reached, and unlock in a set order, so if you reach the required treasure point level in the Himalayas for an optional level in the Amazon it will still unlock. These optional levels are generally much harder than the story levels and will require a lot more thinking.
The goal of each level is the same; you have to make your way to the gold key and then over to unlock the exit. This may sound simple but levels get increasingly hard and there are a large number of traps and platforms to make each level more difficult for you. The first platform you will encounter is one which once stepped on will break, meaning you can’t go back across it, luckily platforms don’t break while you’re on it, it’s only once you’ve stepped off that they break/collapse/shatter. Although these sound easy enough to overcome, you will often find yourself walking across one, and only once you’ve stepped off will you realise that it’s trapped you in a corner, unable to continue, so there’s an element of pre-planning required. Other platforms designed to hinder include catapults which fling you two platforms across in a certain direction and platforms that you get sucked into. These vary depending on the area you’re in. There are also a large number of traps, such as conveyer belts, snakes, jumping one-eyed octopuses and more. Some levels will also feature sub gates, which require you to collect a blue key in order to unlock.
As well as the basic goal to each level, there is also treasure scattered around the map, ranging from small silver coins, to larger gold coins, to huge diamonds. Collecting this treasure will allow you to gain medals according to how much you collected, and will add to a treasure score which can unlock optional levels for you to complete.
The game features a co-op mode, where one player plays as Hamilton and the other as Sasha the bird. Sasha can help Hamilton by flicking out-of-reach switches and by collecting Mystic Dust, which is used to power the special powers which Hamilton receives throughout the game. Although you do get three different powers in total, only one is actually needed to overcome one type of trap, and the others aren’t used at all. Sasha is also available in Singleplayer, where you can switch between the characters with the ‘Square’ button.
Controlling Hamilton throughout the game is fairly intuitive, with the analog stick controlling movement and the ‘Cross’ button activating switches and gates but the same cannot be said completely for controlling Sasha. For the most part Sasha is easy to control, but the one area I had difficulty in is the height control, often I found myself being much higher or lower than I though I was, and getting stuck against various objects, and sometimes had a fair amount of difficulty trying to get unstuck, although this may be in part due to the set camera angle. This set camera angle means all the level is viewed from the side, which does most of the time mean that enough of the level is seen to allow you to calculate which route to take, and allows you avoid the traps, but sometimes the camera angle can become a hindrance. Occasionally I found that I thought I’d completed a level and collected all the treasure but discovered I’d in fact missed one coin, even though I couldn’t see any left, because it was sneakily hidden behind another object. Other times a pathway may be hidden behind something else, meaning a needless amount of time is spent trying to complete the level when the way is much easier than you thought.
Overall Hamilton’s Great Adventure is a good puzzle game, with colourful graphics, a range of environments, and a large number (60 in total) of levels. It’s worth getting if you’re an avid puzzler, but prepare to spend a lot of time towards the end on retrying levels over and over again as the difficulty does spike in places, which is not good if, like me, you get easily annoyed when you can’t complete a level. Great Adventure has a fair amount of replayability, you'll doubtless be trying to get gold medals on each level, and at £7.99 or thereabouts it represents good value, but I’m not sure it’s addictive enough to make you return again and again like the very best puzzlers do.
Best Bits
- Large number of levels. - Range of environments. - Intuitive controls.
Worst Bits
- Difficulty spikes. - Camera angle can get in the way. - Received powers are underused.
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