Mobile Game Review of "Hamster Mansion"

Hamster Mansion goes for cuteness for an action puzzle, and it's a fine balance between cute and way too cute.

Basically, as one of the final few hamsters left in the city, where gophers reign supreme, you must reclaim the glory of the Hamster Mansion by reclaiming parts and items from various stages, collect stars and nuts, avoid enemies such as thieves, bugs, spiders, and environmental hazards like sprinklers, fetid water drops, and more. You'll also meet other hamsters and other characters on the way. You can then use the parts you collected, to rebuild hamster mansion into your dream, with multiple chambers, tubes leading here and there, water feeder, hamster wheel, and much more.

So what's the GAME about? Basically, it's a little bit Mario, a little bit Mega Man. You're this pretty harmless hamster, except if you can jump ON a bug, you can eliminate it. Jump across a spider's thread, and it'll fall. Can't do anything about bees, pirahnas, and so on though, or stuff like fetid water drips, sprinklers, and so on. You can actually climb walls and ceilings like a fly, and you'll often need to, in order to reach special places. Explore every nook and cranny as some contain surprise tunnels with more nuts and sometimes, hot sausage, which allows you to use your breath as a flamethrower to kill bugs, for a VERY limited time.

So the idea is jump, run, and climb around to reach new spots, explore across screens of hazards, avoiding them as you can, and hopefully reach the "end" before you run out of lives. If you run out of lives, you simply go back to "the junction", and the level resets, so you can start over and over.

Graphics are pretty cute, but I am afraid the exploration is a bit tough. A LOT of the exploration is into very hazardous areas, and with limited lives to explore the entire level (which are huge, spanning several screens) it can be quite a challenge until you learned all the path you needed.

You can customize your hamster in the beginning, which should help you stay attached to it. Unfortunately, I found the levels way too big, and lack of a "save" function means I have to do the same section over, and over, and over... and that just gets boring. Kids may like it more, but I don't.

Overall rating: 6 out of 10
Pros: Cute hamsters, customization of mansion and hamster, cute abilities
Cons: Way too repetitive, basically forces you to be PERFECT AND explore