Note - when I have time (and get the video to work properly with Lightworks) I will be recording and uploading a video review. Also, yes. The screenies need to be re-sized... please hold...
Videogame technology is a wonderful thing. In just forty years, we’ve come from deflecting a pixelated white ball between two white sticks to full blown photorealistic war shooters. Still, as our experience in shotgun blasting our virtual enemies in the face become more and more realistic, sometimes the fun portion of the game becomes questionable. Sure, amazing visuals are great for a game, but do we really need to see each part of a terrorist’s head explode into small skeletal bits and the gore to splatter across our screens to have fun?
Feel free to send me hate emails for this, but I’ve been a little tired of “realism” in gaming. Cover-based shooters and RPGs are all great, but I’m a little tired of seeing much of the same gaming tropes in triple-A titles lately. That’s not to say games like Battlefield and are bad. Far from it. I’m just tired of seeing people-like objects doing people-like things… like shoot each other in the face and then having shameless, post-battle coitus. I guess I just want games to feel a little more “gamey”, where in Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage, you had to collect the orbs or in Super Mario 64, you have to collect the stars. Hell, at this point, I even miss the first person shooters where you had to collect health and bullets from the conveniently located med kits and bullets that just happen to fit your gun because your alien enemies carelessly left them behind, cover-based shooters be damned.
I understand that the market has been gravitating towards games with better graphics and more realistic gameplay. Until recently, good graphics have been a staple of what separates a quality game from a shitty game. In fact, I think we still use that as a benchmark in some cases, and it really doesn’t work anymore. Hell, the new Harry Potter games have pretty damn good graphics and have adopted the same cover-based shooter mechanics that all triple-A shooters now boast, except EA, I’d like to remind you that game was an absolute boat of stinky, shitastic fail because this isn’t a god damn Battlefield game. People don’t want the same mechanics for a game about magic as a war game. You’re getting your kinds of nerds mixed up. Your Harry Potter fans are probably in the same age group as the Battlefield players sure, but they’re more of the RPG, let’s-get-sorted-into-different-Houses, swish-and-flick-wand-for-best-results type of guys. The point is, we’re using graphics as a benchmark for what marks a good game and that really isn’t the case anymore when any B-rated development team can pick up a gaming engine like Unity, Source, or Unreal, and hire a half-decent 3D artist and get close to the same results.
I guess that was my beat around the bush way of saying that gameplay mechanics and story are the real benchmark of whether or not a game is good. No longer can players judge how good a game is based off of how big the character’s gun is from the front cover or how good the graphics look off of the back cover. Looking back, some of our greatest games didn’t have the best graphics, but whether or not games were just plain, old fun.
And that’s where indie studios come in. Super Meat Boy and Atom Zombie Smasher aren’t the prettiest games out there, but they are god damn loaded with fun. Nowhere do I have to rip anybody’s face off on close-up either. They’re building off the old idea of not trying to be the best in graphics or story even, where I’m usually a nitpicker, but simply making the gameplay mechanics so damn cute and entertaining that you want to play it. Five hours go by because the game genuinely captures your interest, not because it plays off of the forgetting-to-parent-and-now-have-dead-baby type of addiction that MMOs thrive off of.
Hamilton’s Great Adventure by Fatshark is one of those indie games that are just damn fun. I had mixed reactions coming into the game at first because, quite frankly, I wasn’t sure what to make of Fatshark’s work overall and because puzzler strategy games aren’t really my cup of tea. I’m one of those people who like to have my tea plain and bitter, which is to say I like those nail-biting, angsty type of games where you have to choose between the lesser of two evils and both of those two evils leave everyone’s panties up in a bunch. So Hamilton’s Great Adventure felt a little wrong for me, after all it’s lighthearted and lacks a general morbidity suited to my deadened taste buds. And really, I have that type of gamer’s OCD in puzzle strategy games where I have to finish the game with everything, or else every time I opened the game, I’d have a nagging sense that my life is somehow incomplete.
Hamilton's really has some enjoyable enemy descriptions...
After the first hour of Hamilton’s I was pleasantly surprised. Somewhere my deadened taste buds still had the life in them to try out something else without projectile vomiting it back up out of disgust. In fact, my reaction was quite the opposite.
Hamilton’s story can be pieced together from the title. The story’s about a grandpa, indeed named Hamilton, telling his granddaughter of his glory days—his great adventure. No, Hamilton wasn’t a youth fighting in any World Wars. Instead, he was off being a regular Indiana Jones, working with “The Professor” to recover a stolen valuable called the Fluxatron. The puzzler’s story isn’t exactly integral to the gameplay. In fact, it’s almost used as an excuse for Fatshark to put together a game of different puzzles and have it make some semblance of sense. Either way, Hamilton tries to track down the Fluxatron and it ends up taking him all over the world, from the Amazon to the Himalayas.
So, the crux of the gameplay are the puzzles. You guide Hamilton through the level, collecting coins and purple lanterns with his trusty bird Sasha for some unknown reason. The faster you collect the coins, the better your overall score ends up being. In order to get through each level, Hamilton has to grab a silver key, which will open up the path to the golden key in order to reach the end of the level door that ends the level. If you’ve collected all the coins, then you’ll be greeted with a golden “excelsior!” (a pretentious Latin term for “ever higher”, if you don’t know) that serves as a virtual pat on the back for finishing the level with all coins possible. The purple lanterns aren’t required to finish perfectly. At first, I had no idea what they really were for, and then I realized that they were some sort of magic brain food/powder for Sasha in order to allow Sasha to move.
The levels get exponentially hard as you continue playing. I breezed through the first few stages and managed to “excelsior” may way through all of the first stages (Amazon). At the end of each chapter/act, Hamilton would have to face a boss fight, which is to solve an extremely large puzzle beyond the scope of your screen in order to learn more about what has happened to the mysterious Fluxatron. Obviously, Hamilton ends up facing the “your-princess-is-in-another-castle” problem and ends up having to fly to another part of the earth via hot air balloon in order to track down the Fluxatron.
Upon approaching the Amazon, the levels immediately get harder. Gone are the easy run-throughs of the game. There are rickety wooden planks that Hamilton can only cross once. The less rickety-looking wooden planks, as you guessed, can be crossed twice. Sasha’s role then blossoms into “not entirely useless” as she can be used to help toggle switches that lower barricades. Eventually, the levels reach a certain difficulty where multiple switches have to be triggered and multiple silver keys have to be grabbed and whilst trying to figure out how to get through the level without stranding yourself on a badly built wooden plank floor, enemies will try and fail you during your run.
Verrrrrry helpful descriptions... thanks.
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Most of your enemies are pretty harmless. One shocks Sasha and momentarily paralyzes her and others merely patrol in the same line, waiting to knock you down or shoot out a square. All of the above are minor annoyances. However, there are zombie/frog-like monsters called agents that will sense Hamilton’s movement and attempt to knock him out. Maybe it’s the kid-friendly atmosphere that the game sets up, but the agents made me shit almost as many bricks as when I played through Amnesia.
The combined effort of the obstacles, keys, and agents will make any level in Egypt an absolutely kick-you-in-the-ass experience. You laugh through the Amazon and maybe you’ll gnash your teeth a few times through the Himalayas, but Egypt will strap you down and make you its bitch. There’s not a level you can run through except the first four that you won’t have to repeat at least twice, and the agents are going to dangle “excelsior” in front of your face, and then steal it away with the one silver coin that you missed and leave you at a disappointing “awesome”. I guess the one positive thing is that Hamilton’s taught me that my gamer’s OCD is something for me laugh weakly for even dreaming about by bitch slapping me repeatedly and telling me to get the fuck over it because “awesome” is the best I’m going to do if I were ever going to finish and review the game.
In terms of polish, the game is fairly well done, but still needs some work. Whenever the entire map layout ends up being too big (which is every god damn time after the Amazon levels), I find myself having trouble panning the camera over, and sometimes I’ll have to be using my mouse to fight the stubborn camera to look the way I want it to. Sasha’s AI is also perhaps too birdlike for my taste. That’s to say that every time I’m trying to reach for a switch for Sasha to toggle, she’ll crash and get stuck onto just about every obstacle in the way of the switch before making it there. This makes the game a bit frustrating at times, particularly when you have to time certain gates being toggled open in order to move on to the next bit of the puzzle and you click for Sasha to go, but she’ll suddenly be very interested in that deserty pillar over there. Finally, there were certain points where Hamilton can be propelled through a “springy” tile over a gap and although the tile on which he’s supposed to land on certainly exists, he still ends up falling through and you fail the level. I’ve only noticed this bug repeatedly on one Egypt level where it happened three times before the game realized that physics is supposed to be a thing in the game and Hamilton’s feet hit solid ground.
Overall, Hamilton’s makes for a fun puzzle game to play through for a solid five or six hours. It’s hard to find something to nitpick at in a game that’s been made purely for the purpose of fun. I don’t know why I’m being so nice in this review, maybe it’s the childish atmosphere that the game is so successful at creating that brings out some inner nostalgia in me that reminds me of fond games from the past that makes me like this game so much. Either way, it’s $10 on Steam and it’s worth every cent if you’re looking to take a break from your assault rifle murder spree.
