Animorphs - Shattered Reality [U] ISO
Description :
Animorphs: Shattered Reality is an Action game, developed by SingleTrac and published by Infogrames, which was released in 2000.
This game's story follows the same premise as the books. Evil alien
species secretly invade Earth while humans remain clueless, noble alien
species fighting the evil alien species for control of the galaxy, noble
alien crashlands on Earth, recruits a group of teenagers with attitude,
and gives them a special power specific to the noble alien species,
with which the teens can secretly fight the evil invaders. However, once
the premise is established, the game throws every book in the series
out of a nearby window, jumps forward in time, and gives you a story
completely unrelated to the books.
In this game, Visser 3 (one
of the main bad guys of aforementioned evil alien species) has
discovered an incredible, reality altering crystal, which he tries to
exploit for some unexplained reason. (the game just goes with the
explanation: "Because he's evil, OK!?" and leaves it at that.)
Naturally, things go wrong, and the machine he built to exploit the
reality altering crystal explodes, and reality gets altered. Amazing. So
the teenagers with attitude must collect the shattered pieces of
crystal in order to re-assemble the shattered reality mentioned in the
title.
Positively engrossing.
Gameplay:
In order
to reconstruct reality, you must take control of one of four specially
trained reality carpenters (read: normal kids) and go on an amazing
platforming adventure through exotic locations where the shards of
crystal happened to land. For each level, you get to choose to take
control of Jake, Rachel, Cassie, or Marco. You can switch characters
anytime you begin a new level, which would be a nice feature, were the
difference between characters not purely cosmetic. Sure, they all look
different, and they all have different voices, and their chosen
"battle-morphs" are all different, (Jake gets a tiger, Rachel gets a
grizzly bear, Cassie is a wolf, and Marco is the ever omnipotent
rhinoceros) but all four characters play exactly alike.
Gameplay
in and of itself is of the platforming variety. Your teenager will run
through locales, hopping on inexplicably floating platforms, (I guess
gravity IS a part of reality. Which was shattered.) and collecting what I
can only identify as "A coins". There may be an officially recognized
term for them, but "A coins" seem pretty accurate considering they're
just floating golden coins with the trademark Animorph "A" on them. The
"A coins" act as your basic platformer coins. Collect 100 of them, and
you gain a new life.
Platforming in this game is largely 2-D,
(left to right) but will sometimes throw a third D into the mix.
(Forward and backward.) The 2-D platforming works completely naturally
for the most part, but going forward and backward is somewhat awkward.
You have no control of the camera, so jumping in towards the screen is
inaccurate to say the least. Fortunately for you, shadows are a part of
the reality that was not shattered, and you can use your shadow to
approximate where you will land. And occasionally, the game will throw
in a bit of combat, where your chosen teen will morph into his/her
battle form, to ensure you don't get bored or frustrated by the
platforming bits. Sadly, combat is unresponsive. You have a total of one
attack button, which can't even be pressed multiple times to assemble a
multi-hit combo. Therefore, combat is a bit of a hit-and-run activity.
Run up to the enemy, attack, flee, run back in, do another single hit,
repeat. It's boring and repetitive, and does nothing for the gameplay.
Thankfully, there's minimal combat in this game.
There's also a
small amount of Starfox style gameplay, in which you morph into an
animal with high mobility (dolphin in water, dragonfly in air, bat in
darkness) and control them as their surroundings fly by them, hopefully
avoiding any obstacles in your way. Not that hitting obstacles hurt you.
You're immortal during these Starfox segments, and you can run into all
the fishnets you want without dying. There's a bit of a catch to this,
though. In the books, if you stayed in a morph for over two hours, you
would be stuck in that morph forever. This already imposing time limit
has been shortened to two minutes in this game, and while obstacles
can't physically hurt you, they will slow you down. So if you're
swimming through the ocean for longer than 2 minutes without escaping,
the game will be over. The only other time you morph is during combat,
and the 2 minute time limit exists during that time as well, but for the
most part is completely harmless, as combat will rarely take longer
than 20 seconds.
As you can tell from the hit-and-run tactics
required with combat, this game isn't difficult. It's clearly oriented
towards children. Sure, platforming can be difficult when jumping
towards the camera, and you will probably fall countless times. But
checkpoints are grouped closely together, and lives are plentiful. It's
not unusual to have 30 lives at any given time, given how plentiful they
are. The game just isn't challenging. Not to mention this game is
short. 3 hours short would be stretching it, and would only apply if you
really, really wanted every A coin in the game. Still, you can probably
get some extra play time by playing as every character in every level,
though you'd get nothing for doing so.
Graphics:
As
mentioned earlier, the crystal shards flew all over when it exploded,
leading to some exotic locales. From the ocean floor, to inside of a
volcano, to a national park complete with picnic tables and campfires,
to the rooftops of skyscrapers, your eyes probably won't be bored by the
extravagant areas you travel to. However, this is a PS1 game, and this
must be kept in mind. Graphics are somewhat cartoony, and blocky. Each
of the kids look suspiciously the same, with different hair and clothes
color, and the grizzly bear that Rachel morphs into is nothing more than
a brown square with legs and what I suppose is a head. Aliens have
considerably less detail than I would of liked, and the morphing
animation is nothing more than smoke and glitter surrounding your
character until their animal pops out. Still, this IS a PS1 game, so
keep this in mind when playing.
Sound:
This is where this
game really shines. Music is outstanding, with perhaps the only boring,
repetitive track being the combat music, which doesn't pop up much, and
doesn't last for long anyway. The dragonfly theme really stands out to
me, a sort of techno styled track with lyrics and a singer, because it
actually contains SINGING, something you didn't often get from licensed
games from this era. Voice acting is equally amazing, with each actor
suited perfectly for their character. The voice cast contains relatively
unknown actors, but they shine through even when faced with the
horrible dialogue written for this game. ("It's a jungle in here!" while
your character is jumping through a jungle. "It's morphing time!" while
your character is animorphing, cheesy stuff like that.) I was impressed
by how far this game exceeded my expectations in the sound department.
Overall:
PROS:
Great voice acting.
Great music.
Solid 2-D platforming.
Play as any of the four characters at any time.
Diverse stage settings.
CONS:
No Tobias or Ax.
Horrid camera.
Awkward 3-D platforming.
No Tobias or Ax.
No morphing animation.
Animals and aliens are not detailed.
The story is bland and not relatable to the books.
No Tobias or Ax.
So
what we end up with is a solid platforming experience, especially
pleasing to your ears, with solid Starfox style gameplay thrown in. The
story falls short of what the books accomplish, and the camera is shoddy
at best. Overall, though, it's not very enjoyable. Sure, the gameplay
is solid, but it's not something you're going to remember years after
you play it. The extremely short gameplay also hinders this game, and as
you can tell from my cons list, there is no Tobias or Ax in this game.
Tobias is mentioned once in a random audio clip, but there's absolutely
no mention of Ax. It's hard to appreciate the cast when only 2/3 of the
characters are shown.
Link Download :
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