In another universe, there’s a funky substance called "plast," which can be shaped into just about anything. Need a new car, house or friends? Well then, you just call on a shaper, one of those talented people who, you guessed it, shapes plast, and you’ve got what you want. At some point, one of the greatest shapers of all time, Paavo, goes to the dark side and is using the plast for his own evil needs. That’s where you come in as Nevin, the newest shaper on the block. You arrive on the planet Proteus, which is made entirely of sentient plast. And some of that plast isn’t too happy about Paavo’s evil deeds, so it works with you to defeat him by providing you with a plast-ified armor suit.

Alter Echo is all about Nevin’s connection with his plast suit. Throughout the game, the suit will pick up new capabilities. It has a heavily armored, cannon-packing gun form, a standard sword-form that operates as a basic armored suit, and there’s a stealth form which is very Puma-like, allowing Nevin to climb specially marked walls while going invisible for limited amounts of time. You can switch through the various plast forms at the flick of a button, and you’ll find some areas absolutely require you to use every available form along with Nevin’s time-dilation abilities. Did I mention you can control time? You can, and it comes in handy when you need to cut a swath through multiple opponents. The time-dilation system is an odd duck, and somewhat difficult to explain. You see, you enter time-dilation mode, and a tile puzzle appears on screen, showing an arrow, a power bar, and all your opponents as tiles in the puzzle. You create an attack path to each opponent by using the directional buttons while the power bar pulses along. If you take too long to choose your next step (and it’s typically 3-4 steps to each opponent at a minimum), time returns to normal and your attack is launched, taking out some or none of your opponents, depending on how well you navigated the tile puzzle. At first, the time dilation system feels like an uncontrollable mess, but as you get accustomed to it, you’ll be tearing through three, four and five enemies at a time. While I applaud the developers for introducing this interesting gameplay nugget, it throws off the pace of the game and can be pretty frustrating. Outside of time-dilation, the rest of the gameplay consists of you running through different landscapes, beating up your opponents and grabbing power ups. It’s all pretty standard fare for an action-platformer.

This game is like a psychedelic trip through the innards of the most bizarre world you’ll ever see. Outrage pulled no punches with the colors and graphical stylings in Alter Echo. As you work your way through the acid-trip levels, you’ll surely realize that the developers must have really loved purple and yellow. The game world is a living breathing entity, and as such, it’s very rounded with an almost thumping effect to it. The bright colors are probably what threw me the first time I saw it at E3, causing me to think that this was a children’s game, which it certainly isn’t. The only thing lacking in the visuals is a sense of texture, as everything is very smooth, and thus gives off a feeling of a game made before powerful graphics engines were available to consoles.

Nevin’s plast suit is the highlight of the visuals, though it’s not without its flaws. While the sword-form is pretty to look at, Nevin’s unprotected head looks like a cheap cut and paste job sitting atop the suit. The suit itself shows very little aliasing, yet the head is a choppy mess of jaggies. The gun and stealth forms are much prettier, especially the stealth form, which has little dongles that sway in the breeze as Nevin runs about. It’s especially cool to watch the stealth form pounce upon the head of an unsuspecting opponent and start slashing at its face. In any form, Nevin moves smoothly in relation to the suit’s abilities. The stealth suit is my hands down favorite again, as it puts Nevin on all fours, and has him moving just like a wildcat, with haunches flexing and his "paws" extending to get a grip on surfaces.

I’d like to ask Outrage just how many times the term "hell" is needed in dialogue to make a point? Most of the time, Nevin’s voice-acting makes him sound pretty generic, and so they must have decided to spice up the voice acting with frequent "how in the hell" or "what the hell" bits of dialogue. It seems like Outrage tried to make Nevin seem like a smart Alec, but as a whole his dialog and that of his compatriots just falls flat and is very unoriginal.

Most of the sounds in the game do the job, though none are terribly remarkable. The gun form’s cannon has a nice thumpa-thumpa effect to it, and the pitter-patter of the stealth form’s walk is good stuff to be sure, but overall, it’s just standard platforming sound. The soundtrack is so unremarkable, I had to go back to the game and play it again before writing this review just to refresh my memory of it.

Alter Echo is a good game, just not a great one, and as such, I’d suggest renting it. It’s got plenty of flair that helps it rise above some of the more generic platformers that have graced consoles this year, but it’s just not unique enough to hold your interest for more than one play through.

See more screens on the Alter Echo media page