Hamilton's Great Adventure Demo

Simple puzzle games have the potential to devour your spare time if you let them, especially those that are complicated enough to pose a challenge, yet not too much so to become frustrating. Hence, when the mixture is just the right, the rewarding feeling you get after every completed level is worth the trouble, regardless how long it takes you to do so.

Hamilton's Great Adventure tries very hard to be one of the good guys, but it fails to be attractive enough in order to captivate the players for longer than ten minutes. While some of the ideas are quite interesting, the gameplay gets too repetitive and annoying to be worth the trouble, especially in the later levels, which require a lot of trial and error.

The story is very basic as well, since it features a guy by the name of Hamilton, who goes around the world to explore fascinating locations, accompanied by his best friend, a bird. Not a lot of background is provided on him or his intentions, so you kind of just have to marvel at the fact that he has an intelligent bird as a companion and he’s courageous enough to venture into dangerous places.

Each level works by the same principle, which is quite simple: you must get to the end of the stage by picking up keys and carefully calculating your steps. The levels are tile-based, so your character can only move in fixed increments. Some of the tiles can only be used once before they collapse, so you really need to make up a route from the beginning and avoid going backwards, unless the tiles allow you to do so.

This gimmick is both intriguing and incredibly frustrating, because it requires you to calculate everything from the start of the level. Obviously that takes all the fun from the game, not to mention the fact that the camera is atrocious and you do not even get to see most of the environment beforehand. Hence, you are bound to just fail a couple of times before you get it right, even if you could have anticipated the right moves beforehand.

All things considered, Hamilton's Great Adventure is not rewarding enough to be worth the trouble, because there’s nothing different waiting for you later on. In fact, it is the same thing up until the end, with not enough variety to keep you from getting bored.