A young boy is sneaking around his creepy neighbor's house when he gets caught and tied up. He awakes in the basement and realizes he's strapped into a dentist's chair and that his neighbor is standing over him. After a few zaps from a funky machine, he sees some lizard men in the next room who are giving orders to the neighbor. Then he turns into a blue lizard himself and is tossed into another dimension where he must overcome the evil lizard men before their plan is hatched.

One has to wonder if game company executives are overt about passing out hallucinogens at these brainstorming meetings or if they just sneak them into the brownies.

Either way, that's the setup for the platform and adventure game Scaler. You'll play the part of a shape-shifting young hipster with an attitude and a varied set of abilities. Starting off, you'll have a wicked tongue that can take out enemies at long range and a set of claws that are good for both smacking baddies upside the head and climbing. As the game progresses, you'll take different forms that grant different abilities. You'll be able to wield explosive orbs with one and roll into a spiky ball and charge at enemies like a bowling ball with another. Transforming into a bat-like creature takes the game to a new perspective by letting you fly. All of the different forms offer abilities vital to progress and access to previously off-limits areas. But they also help immensely in keeping the action from becoming old too quickly.

Because, as with most games of its type, Scaler challenges you to navigate levels filled with lots of multi-tiered platforms. Each is filled with easily dispatched baddies and often connected by long vines. These you ride like a skateboarder from platform to platform, and they're somewhat reminiscent of old sonic games. They're some of the most entertaining parts of the game, with vines that have obstacles of their own and paths with steep drops and fast turns. Along the way you'll need to collect glowing orbs of energy and lizard eggs to keep things moving forward.

The presentation in the game - the environments, the bad guys, the effects - aren't as solid as the characters in the cut scenes, and that's too bad. The main character, in both human and blue lizard form, is pretty endearing without being annoyingly cute. And the supporting characters come across as fun caricatures with clear personalities of their own. And while the world of your adventure is very colorful, sometimes it's too colorful. Some scenes make your eyes hurt - with vibrant greens, reds and blues all being a little too obnoxious. The creatures you face range from plain-looking destructive plants to dangerous, well-realized monsters, but the whole package doesn't come together very well. It's like the different pieces were created by completely different people and, as a whole, it's not very consistent.

Graphics don't have to push the envelope for a game to be enjoyable (not everything needs to look like Rallisport Challenge 2), but they need to be good in other ways - they need to create something you can see clearly enough to understand what's going on and be pleasing enough to the eye to keep you interested. Scaler succeeds in some ways, but not others. Sometimes the environments are such a chaotic mess that it's hard to figure out how you and your character even fit in. But most of the time you're presented with just so much color that you'll want to start cleaning house just to give your eyes a rest.

As you jump and slide from one platform to another, collecting energy orbs, it's obvious you're playing yet another platform adventure game. If you like them, or if you have a young person in your life, you'll definitely like Scaler. It does well by the proven conventions of the games before it; The story is, at the very least, entertaining to watch unfold and there's more than enough game for $20. But it's not doing these things better than other platform games and adults will find the style wears thin quickly.