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Artificial Mind and Movement moves from a hip-hop flavored rapping game to a kid-friendly platformer with amazing quickness. If 2002 was known for its many platform games, 2004 will surely be known for kid-friendly platform games. So far, we have reviewed EA Games’ Ty 2 and THQ’s Tak 2, but there are others like Crash Twinsanity and the upcoming Spyro A Hero’s Tail. While Scaler lacks the brand-name behind those titles, it is still a pretty fun if not all that special platformer.
Scaler features a story of sorts, something about kid being teleported into a lizard world for one reason or another. All you really need to know is that you’ll be fighting a lot of lizards in the game. The story isn’t engaging in the least bit and seems to be added solely because A2M realized that they couldn’t develop a story-less game.
Scaler is a basic platformer. The game’s levels have you collecting many items, which are scattered around and needed to move on, while you grind rails located throughout the levels (one of the best parts of the game, actually) and use Scaler’s climbing abilities to climb up walls while occasionally avoiding an enemy or two. For the most part though, you'll have to fight these enemies with a simple but functional attack system. Additionally, Scaler can turn into various things like a bird (which has the special ability of launching projectiles, in addition to flight). There are other switchable forms in the game and they all have their own unique abilities, but these aren’t used very intuitively in the level designs. Overall, Scaler doesn’t try to be anything more than a pretty standard platformer and in that it succeeds.
The game’s visuals are pretty impressive for a budget, kid-oriented platformer. The various levels in the game are rather large and have a dreamy atmosphere to them, which works very well for the game. The particle effects in the game are strong, as A2M has created a great “spark” effect for the game, which you’ll notice as you slide down rails. Moreover, the frame-rate keeps up with the game, and the camera never becomes burden. On an artistic level though, Scaler just isn’t all that interested with incredibly standard characters that seem to come from the marketing department at A2M.
The game’s audio package is standard stuff. You’ll find the typical background music for a platformer, and the same could be said for the sound effects. The voice acting isn’t bad on a technical level, it sounds quite good, but it doesn’t have much creativity or originality behind the dialogue.
When it is all said and done, Scaler isn’t much more than your functional, slightly-but-not-much above average platformer. For $20, there are certainly worst buys and the game would complement perfectly Ty 2 and Tak 2 for a platform-hungry younger gamer. -- Jake Wilson, PGNx Media
---- Oct 27, 2004
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