My review of Hammerheads

Hammerheads is a great new game for Palm devices from Astraware which is available for download. I find it hard to sum up the game and define exactly which genre it comes under, but I guess that it would have to be classed as a puzzle game.

It may sound odd when I say this but trust me I haven’t lost my marbles…the main aim of the game is to bash Gnomes on the head with a hammer. There we go I’ve said it, and it still holds true, that is the name of the game. Do you remember those bashing games at the fairground or at theme parks where you take the big spongy hammer and you have to hit the objects/creatures that pop up from the holes in the table in front of you? Well that is essentially exactly the same as this game apart from it is gnomes you have to hit.

However you may be thinking to yourselves that this is a little bit boring and I wouldn’t blame you, I even thought to myself “hang on a sec” after the first level. However there is a lot more to this game than meets the eye. You begin the game by going through the usual requirements of choosing a user name and of course (because we all never play on without doing it) checking the controls and basically how to play the game. And the first level is as simple as hitting gnomes with a big hammer. However for the second level the game inserts the first of its many twists, a second gnome, different from the first default gnome appears for you to bash. However this gnome requires two hits from the hammer to make it disappear.

This is essentially one of the main elements to the whole game itself, there are more gnomes which appear that require more hits before they disappear. There are also certain gnomes which you not only have to hit two or more times, but you also have to do so within a certain amount of time or the explode thus damaging your health.

This leads me onto the basics of the game. You have a health parameter of five hearts, which if it gets down to zero means your game is over. Your health decreases every time you miss a gnome or due to specific incidents such as; failing to hit a gnome the required number of times in a specific amount of time; or failing to destroy a gnome which if you don’t hit it per se will not only steal your stars/money but also have a detrimental effect on your health.

This once again leads me onto another element of the game throughout playing you collect gold coins/money. For example randomly a coin will appear after you have made a gnome disappear, which you then hit to collect. Also every so often a gold chest will appear from a hole which if you hit it rewards you with numerous gold coins, sometimes too more than one will appear after making a gnome disappear. In the later levels what appears to be a jester on a pogo stick bounces across the screen which if you hit it before it reaches the other edge will give you numerous gold coins. There are also many other various types of gnome and power up which appear but there are too many to individually list here, lets just say some of them help where as some of them hinder your progress.

Your gold coins can also be collected through bonus levels which crop up every so often. The main aim of the gold coins is so that you can spend them in the shop, which also pops up from one of the holes randomly every so often. Amongst the things you can buy from the shop including extra health, and bonus points, are new hammers. Now this is where it gets competitive, because you can purchase hammers that have double, triple and even quadruple power. Therefore you only need to hit a gnome that would require four hits of the default hammer twice or even once to make it disappear depending which hammer you have purchased. This is something you almost have to do as in later levels it gets incredibly complex, very fast and difficult in some ways to keep up with.

Hammerheads is a very addictive game, and it certainly makes you enormously determined to achieve all the objectives in order to progress on to the next level. The simplistic nature of the game makes it instantly playable and as I’ve mentioned incredibly addictive, however this really does not detract at all from the excellent high resolution graphics and the well structured game play on offer. It does get very manic towards the end and it definitely isn’t easy, but then again isn’t that truly what we all love about games? I know I do! 10 out of 10, Astraware do it again, they know how to produce the finest and most exciting games and Hammerheads tops the list.