Review: Scaler (PS2)

Upon encountering a new game, the first thing Gamestyle asks it is, as Frank Zappa said to Ian Underwood, "what can you do that's fantastic?" In Scaler's case, the answer is "not a lot". This game combines low-polygon graphics and shallow level design with cringeworthy surfer-dudeisms (that make it very hard to identify with or even like the protagonist) and a contrived plot. This title is from everywhere and yet from nowhere – it steals ideas from many other games and in the process has stripped itself of any identity, becoming a bland, generic romp despite its twinkliness.

Amidst hippy blither about multiverses and connectedness, Scaler centres on Bobby - a tree-hugging lizard rights activist - who has been transformed into a lizard and teleported to a planet inhabited by other lizards. Out to get him are various corporate bosses from Bobby's world, who for some reason have also been turned into lizards and been sent to the same world. At least, that's what Gamestyle gathered from the cutscenes and storyboard concept art as we progressed through the game – the intro FMV is utterly incomprehensible and served only to confuse us.

As Scaler (the name Bobby chooses for himself when he finds himself on the lizard planet) advances on his quest, he gains the ability to transform into other lizard species with different abilities, such as bomb-throwing, swimming underwater, flying, and curling up into a ball in order to whizz along pinball-esque racetracks. Annoyingly, in each level you can switch between Scaler and only one other predetermined form, and not whichever one takes your fancy. This automatically puts some restriction on the level design, when it could have been much more free-roaming. With half a dozen forms at the player's disposal, it would have made more sense (and been more fun) to exploit the forms to allow multiple ways of solving a problem or navigating an obstacle. We have the technology. In addition, being able to use a form in only a couple of levels renders it rather pointless.

As per usual with platformers, collecting things is the order of the day. The object of this game is to collect all the lizard eggs and return them to our world before they can be mutated and cloned into an evil army. Also to find are crystal gems (you'd be hard pushed to come up with a more generic name than that, it must be said), which unlock concept art for the completists out there. Currency is in the form of klokkies (pronounced "cloakies"): yellow blobs of spiritual energy that can be fed to an obliging pterodactyl, who will then partially digest them and vomit up a magic goo that gives Scaler a new ability (kudos for that idea, at least). These are mostly upgrades to health, electric bomb capacity and attack strength and all the usual jazz, but a few are needed in order to further your quest. One of these is the camouflage ability, which lets you become invisible for up to eight seconds in order to evade the nasty trappers that live in the mud.

At least, that’s the idea. The AI is often, too often, unfair. The controls and camera serve to make this game vexatiously hard, and you'll die many times through no fault of your own. Scaler sometimes doesn't do what he's told in time to save him from death (and yet sometimes he does – the lack of consistency is very annoying), and the camera often shows the action from a shonky angle that makes it hard to see an incoming attack or grind-rail obstacle, forcing the player to negotiate some sections from memory (and re-do them to the point that it gets boring and tests your patience instead of your thumbs). It's as though the developers ran out of cash halfway through making this game, and so instead of making more than a pitiful handful of levels have simply made the existing ones so irritating you won't want to bother finishing them. But you might do so anyway, as this game is very apt at making Gamestyle bitterly continue, motivated by the desire not to be defeated by this little game with delusions of grandeur.

There isn't even a great deal of variety to the levels, or even much to distinguish them from the others. Nearly all of them are set in the same swampy, jungly environment, and they mostly consist of beating up some enemies, jumping and climbing around a bit, riding a grind rail (which are actually pretty fun the first ten or twenty times), and repeating all of the above until your thumbs fall off.

Combat is a straightforward button-mashing affair. Scaler in his default form has two attacks: smacking with his claws (plus the obligatory double jump and then smack down) or with his protractile tongue (insert your own fisting/tonguing puns here). His tongue is less powerful than his claws, but it has the advantages of letting him pick up objects just out of reach and briefly stunning some enemies, and it's also the only attack he can use while climbing vertical surfaces. A dodging technique or a lock-on/strafe, instead of having to undignifiedly run round in tight little circles, would have been nice, as getting hit is very easy and Scaler doesn’t always respond in time.

This is a chirpy title that thinks it's a lot better than it actually is. Scaler himself is easily forgettable - he isn't cute or cool-looking or anything in particular - and is as unlovable as Crash Bandicoot, who was just as nightmarishly ugly (but did know when to shut up). The developers also seem to have forgotten that they're coding for the PS2 and not its older brother. This game looks and plays very like a PSone title, and could probably be released on a platform of that generation without much loss of level size or graphics quality - you're just seven years too late, chaps. Scaler is, in fact, not a lizard but an elephant in disguise. A white elephant, that is: this game is too hard for little gamers to earn their platformer wings, and too annoying for the rest of us, who will have seen all the worthwhile bits before, to grace with our time.

Rating: 5 / 10

Words by Anna Ghislaine