Jewel Case Release
| Genre: Action |
CDs: 1 |
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| Publisher: Infogrames |
Released: August 30, 2000 |
| Developer: SingleTrac Studio |
UPC: 7 42725 17430 6 |
| Sony ID: SLUS-01010 |
PSRM: 016360 |
| Players: 1 Player |
Memory: 1 Block |
| Accessories: Analog, Vibration |
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| ESRB: Everyone – Animated Violence |
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| Box Copy:
Morph Into Action! Looks can be deceiving. You look like an ordinary kid, but you’re not – you’re an ANIMORPH! You have the power to turn into any animal you touch! The power to morph! A power that will be tested to its outer limits against an all-new Yeerk menace – a time-altering device that shatters reality itself! Features:
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Variants
- There are no known variants.
Misprints
- There are no known misprints.
Review
Today we hit up the children’s game Animorphs: Shattered Reality, based on the Scholastic property of the same name. If you weren’t in grade school in the late 90s, Animoprhs were everywhere. Over 50 published books, a tv series, the video game, and whatever other marketing they could get their hands on dominated the toy aisles.
Even the Transformers got involved, with the Animoprhs snagging a sub-line in the Beast Wars toy series. They were totally normal, like how these three completely human looking humans somehow morphed into one dinosaur.
The universe focuses on 5 humans – Jake, Marco, Cassie, Rachel, and Tobias, the latter who we’ll deal with later. These young heroes and heroines befriend Ax, an Andalite – who comes from an alien race that resembles centaurs. With their combined strength, the team becomes a force of good to stave off an alien race known as the Yeerks.The Yeerks are led by a big baddie named Visser Three. Turns out Mr. Three has a sneaky way to take over human beings and make them his slaves. It involves letting a smaller creature crawl inside you…yeesh.
Here in Shattered Reality, a Continuum crystal has been broken into pieces thanks to Visser being a goober. Players will need to jump through a variety of levels to retrieve all of them.
There’s just one problem. Literally none of that matters with the PlayStation game. I could have told you it was a war-torn knitting competition and that would hold up. The only clue that you know this is an Animoprhs game is that you occasionally become an animal and beat-up a Yeerk.
Admittedly, even if you strip off the branding, the game is a fairly fun platformer with some flying stages sprinkled in. Let’s talk about the positives first. You choose from Jake, Marco, Cassie, or Rachel. Each character turns into their own animal, which comes equipped with the same one swipe animation. Their differences are more subtle in strength and speed. The bear is the strongest in swipes, but the wolf is the fastest. In the larger picture, none of it really matters, but the end fight flips that concept.
What makes Animorph fun is that you’re allowed to just play. Enemy encounters are separate from the level’s constant platformer aesthetic. Developer Single Trac (yes…that one) understood their core audience and gave them a trail of collectible coins to follow, with the typical 100 allowing for an extra life. Extra life icons are also dropped in and around stages, giving the player a rare sense of security in their adventures. There’s just enough extra currency lying around to provide an ample buffer between the player and the ‘game over’ screen. A fact marred by the realization mid-game that they’ll need all those extra lives to make up for some rage-inducing technical problems, discussed further on. Back to positivity.
Shattered Reality’s set-pieces are really well done. From the starting underground romp, to the tree-filled forest, to the subway tunnel and beyond, the creativity in stage design and layout is shockingly inspiring for what is essentially a throw-away retail product. As the game reaches its final acts, whole sections of the city have been destroyed, swallowed whole by magma, or buried in the snow and ice of the zoo. It’s a truly end-of-the-world feel – especially from a children’s game. The question is, was this the result of reality being shattered, or is this the Yeerks having some fun? The world may never know.
I was also surprised by the music – the sound department outdid themselves when it came to the soundtrack. The biggest shock comes when you’re morphed into a dragonfly and must haul ass through a swamp. This banger of a song comes on and it shines brightly on an already well-lit track assortment. Probably the best feature on the entire platter.
Now comes the bad news; the game is a technical disaster that almost destroys the entire experience. Despite the creative level design, the game suffers from pretty bad screen tearing. And that’s just from this being recorded on an emulator – on the actual PlayStation hardware on a CRT the game’s visuals literally split in half sometimes. The spiked ice area in the zoo area particularly stands out as a major headache area.
Worse still are the physics and clipping. As an unironic standard feature, your jump can be slightly controlled by how long you press the jump button. However, randomly the jump will either abruptly stop or worse, send one flying an extra few feet into the abyss. Compounding this oddity is that the clipping of stage parts can be completely random. A cliff edge or floating platform you know you nailed on the prior jump now sees you pass right through it on the second go around. There are at least three smaller platforms I still can’t land on after 6 play-throughs.
There’s also a rare hiccup with the camera, where depending on the jump and angle you take, the camera gets locked off-center, so you can’t see what’s ahead of you. It eventually auto-corrects, but it makes for some frustrating deaths.
Between using a D-Pad while recording on the Polymega and a Dual Analog on the real hardware, my god just use the analog stick. It helps provide a small bit of extra movement mid-air when vying for a platform that just moved on you. It won’t help the clipping issues, but I noticed it felt easier on the 2nd and third run throughs.
One last note on the problems are the fights themselves. While you only have one attack, the enemies usually have two, occasionally three. There is no priority in who gets the advantage should you each throw down at the same moment. The only way to play every enemy is to stick and move. Lock on with the R2 button, wait for their attack animation to finish up, swipe, back away and repeat. That’s it, literally every enemy in the game. Oh, and you need to do this within 2 minutes for each fight or you lose a life.
The final boss does put an interesting twist on this nonsense. During your 2 minutes of swiping, the entire floor drops out from underneath you, requiring you to wait on an outer platform for it to rise back up. This adds the only real strategy in the entire game, and that just comes down to ‘get good’ at the stick and move. If you’re playing the wolf, you can beat Visser Three in two drops. Easy peasy. The ending credits roll, hilariously ignoring all the end-of-the-world destruction you witnessed during game play – everything is unshattered just like that.
So after all this, one last question remains; what the hell happened to Tobias? Despite being on the cover, in the opening and closing movie as his eagle form…he’s mysteriously absent from the game. They don’t even list him in the manual. In doing research for the review, he has one of the most tragic stories in the series, including being stuck as an animal.
Curiously, if you use a GameShark Pro’s hex editor and search through names, where his slot should be it is just listed as “Nobody”. But further doom scrolling reveals file names that make it appear he should be unlockable. It makes me wonder if he was either cut for time, or they realized they couldn’t work an airborne creature into the enemy encounters. This is still being researched from a Project Up1 angle, but so far beating the game with each character hasn’t done anything.
On the Library review scale, Animorphs: Shattered Reality is an upsetting four out of ten. The core gameplay is there and the difficulty angle would have been almost perfect for the target demographic. But graphical hiccups, technical camera gaffes, lack of unlockables, and a clearly inconsistent physics and animation engine all but bury the fun you can actually glean from it. Worth a once through for the wonderful set pieces, but not much more.
The Good
- Fantastic set pieces and level design
- Surprisingly great soundtrack
- Perfect progression design for intended audience
The Bad
- Aggravating clipping problems cause unfair death
- Some terrible screen tearing during gameplay
- Where is Tobias?
Final Score: 4/10 – Upsetting
Animorphs: Shattered Reality is a decent platformer absolutely wrecked by technical problems and inconsistent collision detection. Worth a once through, but not much more.
Screenshots
This gallery guide is based on a full run of the game using Jake.
Videos
Video review.
Trivia
- The game is based on a series of Scholastic Books, which in turn had other licenses. Including but not limited to a bizarre tie-in to the Transformers: Beast Wars toy line.
- Tobias, the fifth character in the team, is mysteriously absent in the PlayStation game. Despite there being files that make it appear he should be playable, there’s currently no known way to properly unlock him.
- Marketing of the game included a bicycle giveaway. The manual has the advertising for it, and then in game there are several billboards sporting the image and name of the bicycle.
- Crystals that make up the Continuum aren’t consistent. They appear blue in their machine, but are green when found in the stages. Some are twice the height of the characters, while others the size of a dragonfly. When the final scene happens, the pieces are nowhere to be found.
- Some people have joked at the ‘game over’ movie clip where it looks like the teenagers are just standing there watching their friend be taken over. I think it was supposed to be implied that the children were already brainwashed and are now watching Ax succumb.
- Animorphs’ game engine is so unstable, at some points whole sections of the game don’t load, causing you to fall an abyss to your death.
- Despite being a children’s book series there are some fairly dark themes going on in the print series. This includes one of the characters essentially sending another to their death, and a second giving up their human form.
- It appears in-game union workers aren’t affected by reality being shattered. Late in the game, after traversing destroyed city streets overflowing with magma, two of the platforms you need to jump are based around construction cranes being operated.