The platform game isn’t what it used to be. First of all, “platform” used to mean “platform”, and you’d have to negotiate hundreds of the things to even think about completing some of the larger platform affairs. Then came the likes of Mario 64, Pandemonium and a whole raft of sub-standard pretenders to the throne, and the world was turned on its head. Now, we’ve come to the point where we’re controlling blue lizards as they slide down vines on their feet at a hundred miles an hour, searching for “Kloopies”. Waitress, what did you say was in this cocktail’
Scaler sees you assume the role of Bobby Jenkins, who is just your average guy with one small difference – he loves lizards. Stumbling on a conspiracy, he is accidentally sucked into the lizard world and – you know it – turned into a blue lizard named Scaler. The storyline is, for the most part, fairly throwaway stuff. Indeed, Scaler has been designed as a fun platform romp for those of us who miss the likes of Croc and the quality versions of Spyro The Dragon that elude development teams nowadays. You don’t need a story for this kind of stuff, so there are no points dropped for the weakness of the plot.
Control-wise, you have your standard options available to you, such as the ability to jump, double-jump, climb, slide down long, long, long vines and attack your foes. Attacks can either be done with your auto-targeting tongue (Circle) or with your claws (Square) and these can be strung together into various levels of combination attack. The enemies that Scaler presents are pretty repetitive, and can become just plain annoying after you’ve been playing for an hour. Especially when the exploding enemies make the most irritating noise you’ve ever heard before they launch themselves into your path, hoping to blow you sky high. Again though, this can be ignored to a point, since you’ll be too busy looking for the end of the level and one of those precious lizard eggs to be that bothered about it.
Pickups galore can be found strewn about the game world. Nearly everything you do releases strange orange orbs (named “Kloopies”) that Scaler collects as he goes about his business. There’s no need to “pick up” the Kloopies necessarily, since they seem to float towards you, should they be in close proximity. The confusing thing when you start out, is knowing what the Kloopies are actually for. At the end of the first level, I was holding more than four-and-a-half thousand of the darned things, with no idea why, until the game introduced me to the power-ups that I could get for trading them in. Nothing major here, but the ability to add an extra chamber to your health bar, or upgrade the strength of your attacks is a good one that has served gamers well – as it does here.
Graphically though, Scaler has issues. The worlds and levels look gorgeous for the most part, but whenever you turn around too quickly, or pick up too much speed when sliding along those vines – a chunk of slowdown kicks in to ruin the atmosphere that the game has built up. Also, the visuals seem to liquidise every now and again, only for a split second and only when you’re spinning the camera, but enough to be noticeable and suggest that Scaler could have done with another layer of polish.
So, the final verdict. Scaler is far from being a perfect game and granted, there are better platform titles available, but with that said, Global Star have taken the step of releasing the game at the £19.99 price point. In anybody’s eyes, a £20 game that provides a good ten hours or so of play with a reasonably solid game engine, a decent level of enjoyment and no frustrating sections that make you want to stop playing can only be a good thing. Scaler was never going to set the gaming world alight, but if you’re looking for something to while away a few more of those cold winter hours, you could do much, much worse.
