Overall 7 Graphics 5 Sound 7 Addictive 3 Story 4 Depth 3 Difficulty 7
5.2
Morphing into something underwhelming 1sam234
"Animorphs" was one of Scholastic's longer lasting book series, written by K.A. Applegate. The completed series had 54 main books over 5 years(June 1996-May 2001), depicting a war between 5 human youths and an evil, body-snatching race called the Yeerks, as well as many other alien races in the middle. Each book told a story from a specific character's point of view, either from Jake, Marco, Rachel, Cassie, Tobias and eventually Ax, their Andalite ally that tries to adapt to Earth's customs. All 6 of them have the power to acquire animal forms and morph into them at will with a simple thought, talking through thought-speak and harnessing their morphs' abilities, strengths and weaknesses... For about two hours at a time though, along with keeping their identities a secret from their Yeerk foes as well as their friends and family to avoid them becoming targets.
So with 54 books plus 10 more companion books, there should be some other decent media about them, right? Like a TV show, or games even? Well there was a 2-season show on Nickelodeon that was mostly decent, an potentially upcoming film, but only a couple of games. One was a platformer game, "Animorphs: Shattered Reality" for the PlayStation 1, released on September 6th, 2000. It was developer SingleTrac's final game before their studio closed down shortly after the game's release in the very same year. The game has 8 levels to go through, letting you pick between Jake, Marco, Rachel and Cassie, each with their own morphs to use in each level. Tobias and Ax aren't playable, and are only seen in cutscenes and the Game Over scene.
The game's story is that Visser Three, the Yeerk leader in an Andalite body with its own set of morphs, has created a device that can alter and shatter reality, to which the Animorphs need to collect pieces of a crystal to stop it and the Visser from destroying their reality, hence the game title. Each level has various sections of jumping, puzzles and morph combat in order to complete them. The game is also has a mix of 2-D and 3-D controls and environments, controlling in a way not unlike the Crash Bandicoot games and others like it.
While the graphics in the CG cutscenes look well done for the time and the sound design is really good to hear too, with each character having their own dedicated battle music which is cool, most of the in-game graphics do not look appealing, especially on the humans and the enemies. The characters while human look a bit too blocky, but at least I can recognize their textures as to who they're supposed to be. They also move fairly slow which doesn't help jump distance, and their run cycle in human and morph forms other than Jake's tiger morph look kind of derpy to say the least. The camera placement can also be really confusing, especially when it shifts to a 3-D segment of the level. Sometimes when you're moving up or down in the third dimension, it's hard to tell if you need to just drop down or jump because if you guess that you have jump, you could go right over the platform and fall right into a pit.
The controls also take some time to get used to, but they still feel awkward. Your character outside of battle can do nothing but run and jump. That's literally it. When you morph in battle you can attack, but each battle can only last two minutes, probably trying to cater to the time limit morphs have. I've personally never hit the time limit, but I assume you lose a life automatically. But you'll likely never hit the limit because almost every battle is disgustingly easy. For the weaker enemies, you just combo them once. For the bigger enemies, you just hit them once and run because they retaliate. Hit and run, rinse and repeat until they're dead, every time. You won't get hit often enough to die if you're fast enough, and you'll rarely lose a life to those sections. Thankfully partial-health and full-health crosses are scattered fairly closely together, especially before and after each fight, and even in the fight arenas themselves a few times.
Levels 2, 4 and 6 are linear tracks where you morph into either a dolphin, a dragonfly or a bat, having to dodge obstacles and race to the end in 3 minutes. It basically doesn't matter which character you pick for those levels. In fact it doesn't matter what character you pick for any level. With the exception of some different spoken lines, the battle morph forms and Rachel's flip in her jump, every character plays exactly the same. There's no difference in terms of health, attack power, jump distance, nothing between them. It's like they used the same model for every character, but changed around the textures. There's barely any depth to the game in regards to that, we don't learn anything new about them or their world, it easily could've been in one or more of their books.
As the levels progress, they get especially tricky with their jumping. 80 percent of the levels you actually walk around in are just jump jump jump, morph fight, jump jump jump. This also highlights the game's egregious flaw of practically phasing through the platforms when you try to hop from point to point. If you're not centered on the platform or a little on the far side of the direction you're running in when you land, you'll likely just fall through, resulting in either losing progress or death. You can't even grab onto ledges to pull yourself up if you don't make it, and sometimes pressing the jump button won't work depending on if you're facing away from the platform and you're close to the edge anyway. That's where you'll lose the majority of your lives, but even then it's fairly easy to get the "A" coins and full extra lives. When you game over, you don't even start with the 5 lives you start with in the beginning of the game. You'll basically reset to how many lives and coins you had right before you entered the level. So if you have only 2 lives or even less, you're out of luck in progressing unless you don't want to risk going through and backtrack to a previous level to get more coins and lives.
The checkpoint placement is at least competent and are placed in many sections between them, but unless you get the jumping patterns down in each level they won't matter that much. Each level has its own gimmicks like slippery ice, swinging platforms, and lever puzzles that have you backtrack through a few parts. If you're not careful, you could slide off, fall into a pit, or in rare cases just practically fly forward like a long jump event, with little control on where you want to land. As a result, it makes the game incredibly difficult, until the final boss which once you get the pattern down, can be just as easily exploitable like every other fight before it.
Overall, the game just feels underwhelming outside of the music and sound design. I managed to beat it in less than an hour, and that's with dying and gaming over from the jumps and falling into the pits a few times, with a few breaks in between. While not the worst, it feels too average and too bare-bones. The dialogue from the Animorphs can be funny in-game, but the platforming is finicky, the combat is easy and too exploitable, and there's no replay value in it whatsoever, once you beat it, you're done, that's all folks. This one would've been a rental at the absolute best, but even Animorphs fans would likely not defend this game for long. At 40 to 50-something minutes and its lack of popularity, I'm sure I could hold a speedrun record for this game on "Speedrun.com" if it even recognized that game.
But until then, give this one a cautious play at least, you'll either be interested in the story or disappointed with the rest of it.
Graphics 5 Sound 7 Addictive 3 Story 4 Depth 3 Difficulty 7
Review Rating: 3/5
Submitted: 12-07-16
Updated: 12-08-16
Review Replies: 0
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