Scaler (Xbox)

Scaler is a game that can’t wait to get to its fantasy world, its opening cutscene immediately throwing you into a scene of a kid being tortured by way of electric chair in the basement of a fat general while five lizard people watch on. Luckily, the kid seems unperturbed by the shock torture and these elements do eventually make more sense despite the player being plunged right into the story with little set-up, but only after the strangeness ramps up a little bit more as the electric chair is turned up so high that the boy is transformed into a lizard man and thrown into a portal to the lizard people’s dimension.

This 12 year old kid is Bobby Jenkins, but now that he’s a humanoid lizard, he wears the nickname he earned for his interest in protecting lizards: Scaler. The portal to another dimension hurls him into a world where the five lizard people lead by one called Looger are capturing lizard eggs for a plot to conquer the human world. Scaler sets off into this new world to rescue these eggs, meeting a much larger lizard man named Leon along the way. Scaler and Leon actually have a fairly decent dynamic even though the story doesn’t go anywhere too interesting in general, Scaler’s energy and cockiness contrasting well with Leon’s sarcasm and more knowledgeable approach to exploring this other world. They don’t get too much to work with story-wise due to its overall simplicity, but Bobby avoids being too full of himself to be likeable because he has an appropriate counterweight in Leon’s more down to earth attitude.

Scaler is a 3D platformer set across multiple locations in this parallel dimension filled with reptilian monsters. However, in its attempts to make the place look alien, much of the levels you explore blend together visually, the worlds mostly relying on blue, purple, green, and yellow for their geology and flora. The setting is convincingly otherworldly, but the locations really struggle to stand out from each other besides the introduction of level gimmicks like a huge focus on walls Scaler can climb or an increased presence of water. Your goal in each stage is to collect the lizard eggs, most places having a somewhat branching design where you head off in one direction to collect an egg and open up a new path back at the original split off point. The repetitive art design is thankfully offset by the continued embrace of unique level architecture and challenges, and the constant presence of collectibles fills out the almost empty spaces of these stages. The abundant Klokkies are used to buy upgrades to your health, attack, and abilities and are thus quite common, but the less abundant Crystal Gems that require a bit more exploration or special ability use go towards getting the game’s true ending.

One constant feature across many of the levels are long rail-like structures Scaler will grind with his feet, the player needing to jump, duck, and move between them in reaction to hazards and deadly terminuses. Recovering from a death in Scaler is fairly pain-free, so the rail riding segments are free to gradually grow much more dangerous and tighter in their reaction requirements, but their design never really hits a spot where it’s all too thrilling, a problem with most of the game’s design. The regular platforming is decent but doesn’t ask for the degree of precision or creativity that would make it more than simply an acceptable way of traversing the game world. The combat does its job when there are only a few regular enemies to overcome, some having a speed advantage, others attacking with projectiles, and a few being durable and only packing brief moments of weakness. However, the game likes to throw them together in frequent circular arenas where the battles just drag on as you pack very few combat options and the bad guys continue to be recycled with patterns you’ve learned by this point, only the numbers advantage making these gauntlets all that challenging.

Scaler is often competent but lacks that creative spark that could have made its bread and butter gameplay more interesting, but it tries to pack in plenty of gimmicks to overcome its average fundamentals. The heroic chameleon character will later get the ability to go invisible for half-baked stealth sections, some levels take place on a pterodactyl-like creature called a Repodactyl as you fire at flying enemies or a boss, and other boss fights tend to be about dodging the attacks of one of Looger’s allies until you have the opening to land your attacks. These are all secondary shakeups to the game’s most important gimmick, one that even influenced its alternate title: Scaler: The Shape-Shifting Chameleon. In most levels, Scaler will have the ability to transform into one of that area’s monsters, each of them controlling differently and having unique attack methods. Scaler can swap in and out of these forms at will, individual stages choosing to focus on only one transformation and arranging the levels hazards and enemies in a way that often mixes and matches whether they’ll be needed, Scaler will be preferred, or you can freely discover whether his default form or the monster one is a better fit for the combat scenarios or platforming segments before you.

The five transformations in Scaler are distributed in an odd manner though. The Fruzard is a frilled lizard-like creature that can fire at foes from range, an ability Bobby otherwise lacks, and pretty much as soon as it is introduced it quickly becomes the game’s favored form for a level despite it mostly just providing a simple utility rather than a huge level design shakeup. The forms that do have drastically different capabilities and require appropriately designed levels to accommodate them are barely used by comparison, the penguin-like Swoom’s swimming ability and the flying Doozum creature both barely explored as the game doesn’t seem to want to invest in any form that break from the norm too much. The other two forms, the bomb-dropping Bakudan and the powerful rolling creature called a Krock, feel like they’re either weaved into the regular play a bit better or have their powers properly emphasized, Krock’s shining moment being a series of racing challenges that at least give you plenty of time to play in the form before you’re back to regular Scaler gameplay. Much of the game really is just about Scaler’s base form and its straightforward interactions with the world, but the game’s overall short length might partially be why it too quickly abandons one idea as it tries to pursue a new one that wouldn’t gel with any of the previous transformations. It tries to make effective use of the time it has, but that means you usually only get a small taste of some of Scaler’s more interesting gimmicks and gameplay mechanics.

THE VERDICT: Most of Scaler is about playing a fairly standard platforming game where the combat is a bit weak and the level navigation is a small step above plain thanks to things like the grinding rails. When things like the transformations crop up or you find yourself on the Repodactyl’s back, things do change up just enough the prevent the experience from stagnating, but the short length that prevents things from having the time to grow old also mean they hardly have the time to establish themselves and be explored thoroughly before Scaler quickly moves on to the next level concept. Rather than focusing on fleshing out anything too much, Scaler scrapes by with its small selection of mostly acceptable gameplay gimmicks.

And so, I give Scaler for Xbox…

An OKAY rating. Scaler’s eagerness to plunge into its world with its opening cinematic is the first clue that the game is unable to spend its time exploring and refining its important elements. Scaler wants to move quickly from level to level, creating entirely new mechanics and transformations that are mostly tossed aside in favor of whatever the latest level can bring to the table. With its basic design mostly functional rather than really fun, Scaler puts a lot of the weight on so-so battles and run of the mill platforming that too often segues into an underfed gameplay shift. This lack of focus prevents the game from being more enjoyable, but the constant changing does mean its a series of mild rises in interesting design rather than a gradual drop in quality or outright flat line. Scaler pretty much just needed to give everything on offer the room to breathe and grow, gimmicks needing to have the room to appropriately climb in complexity and potentially interact with some of Scaler’s other gameplay mechanics to truly find their footing.

Scaler’s main attraction might be its underutilized transformations, but the constant transformations the general gameplay undergo keep it somewhat fresh while also preventing anything from ever having the time it needs to settle in and find its niche. As a result, Scaler is a serviceable 3D action platformer, but hardly anything that would stand out in a console generation filled with similar games.