Review: Scribblenauts

5th Cell had a lot of expectations to meet, a lot of hopes and dreams to fulfill in the hearts of gamers everywhere. With an incredible amount of buzz surrounding this little DS title at E3, including the famous NeoGAF post by Feep describing using a dinosaur to defeat robot zombies, Scribblenauts has been described as creative, ingenious, and inspiring. Of course, with this much hype comes the possibility of disappointment. In the end, is Scribblenauts what we all had expected? For the most part, yes. Is it what we wanted? Not exactly. Scribblenauts, although having an excellent concept and providing lots of fun, suffers from frustrating control issues that often detract from the experience and well, the fun.

Scribblenauts‘s concept is to conjure up objects and to use them to solve a puzzle or overcome a series of obstacles. The game’s built-in lexicon of over 20,000 words allows you to think of endless ways to beat a level, whether that is by creating God to fight a bear that is in your path or by using a basket to collect groceries and pay for your purchases. Apple? Pool? Phone? Flamethrower? Rope? Blizzard? Bomb shelter? Abominable Snowman? Einstein? Medusa? God? Keyboard cat? Longcat? Yep, they’re all in the game and available for use. Got a gun? Shoot it, throw it, put it in something, or simply drop it. Objects can even be attached to each other (laser-equipped sharks is a possibility, yes). Your creations interact with each other. A vampire hunter or a sun kills a vampire. A lion tamer can control a lion. Just don’t expect copyrighted nouns, inappropriate words, or any sort of concepts to appear.

Two forms of levels exist in Scribblenauts: action levels and puzzle levels. Regardless of which type of level you choose, you control Maxwell, a boy donning a rooster hat who has to collect a Starite in each level by using his magic notepad to produce objects to obtain the Starite. In action levels, the game becomes very much like a platformer in that you fight towards the location of the Starite in the level as you use the objects to reach it. In puzzle levels, you must solve a problem that the game presents, such as saving a kitten from a tree to returning an alien and its holograph to its spaceship. Naturally the game progressively gradually increases in difficulty with more thought required in the later levels. The most fun is to be had when you plan the most ridiculous way to solve a puzzle and it actually works.

Here’s an example of a level. There is a patient in an optometrist’s office, and you must help him see. What can you do? You pull out your stylus and using either the onscreen keyboard or the handwriting recognition, you write “EYE,” “GLASSES,” “GOGGLES,” “TELESCOPE,” “BINOCULARS,” or any other object you can think of that would give sight to the patient. Puzzles like these become situations in which you have to kill or capture three prison escapees, find three ghosts that haunt certain objects, and open a coffin. They’re not too elaborate, but they’re cute and amusing, and most gamers will easily pass these, although a few will require a bit of thinking to solve.

Scribblenauts grants you creative freedom in not only your problem-solving but in level creation as well. Although it’s more limited than what the guys at 5th Cell used, a level builder is available for use. This will allow you to use any of the game’s nouns, assign different attributes, and reuse much of the game’s art assets. From there, once your level is complete, you can share it with your friends via Nintendo WiFi Connection or locally. It’s a nice way to extend the replayability of the game.

The concept of Scribblenauts is wonderful. How it’s been executed is not exactly wonderful. One of Scribblenauts‘s main flaws refer specifically to its controls: they’re awful. Utilizing the D-pad for the camera and the touch screen for everything else, Scribblenauts proves frustrating when Maxwell does something that you never intended. While certain actions such as jumping is done automatically, Maxwell moves left and right by tapping the touch screen in that direction. This by itself is fine (for the most part), but when coupled with how Maxwell interacts with objects, you may find yourself redoing a level over and over again. If a rope is dangling above a hole and you would like Maxwell to cut it with a sword, you simply tap the rope and then hit the “ATTACK” option. The problem? Maxwell will run up to the rope, even if he is at the edge of the hole and can merely swing his arm to cut it, and fall into the hole, plunging to his death as he activates the mines below. These types of control issues could encourage you to throw your DS out the window.

Scribblenauts may be about creativity and the development of your own solutions to the puzzles, whatever they may be. Unfortunately, this doesn’t go as planned. You may have the most imaginative mind ever, but the game obviously does not keep up with you. I want to attach suction cups to Maxwell’s feet and hands to crawl up the wall. Well, that’s not possible. After seeing your ingenious ideas fail, you may just resort to reusing your most beloved items in the game that never fail. Need to fly? Wings or a jetpack. Need to melt a block of ice? Flamethrower. With the game’s limitations, it’s not always fun to try to think of some crazy method because they simply will not work. You may scream that I’m not creative, but the novelty of setting up a wacky solution wears off rather quickly.

A few other flaws? Over twenty thousands words is an exciting prospect, but it’s rather disappointing when many of the words are duplicates or simply aren’t what you imagined. The objects you produce are also rather limited in what they do, and it’s boggling when some of the puzzle levels can be solved with objects that should not work. The game’s hints are also often very vague and require a lot of trial-and-error to see what the game wants from you.

Well, with these problems, it’s not to say the game lacks content. There are 220 levels in the game with at least three ways to solve each puzzle (and probably even more). Completionists can try to earn as many Ollars (the game’s currency, which is given when completing a level and is used to purchase new worlds, avatars and music) and all the Merits, which are achievements given when completing levels for not using weapons, setting four or more objects on fire in one level, spawning a 5th Cell developer, etc.

You won’t get the mind-blowing game that many had hoped for with Scribblenauts. Instead, you’ll get a fun yet frustrating DS title that is a decent attempt at encouraging gamers to be creative. It’s not the prettiest DS game and it’s definitely not the most fun, but Scribblenauts has its charm and will offer something new. But when you’re promised freedom, it’s depressing to find restraints on what you can do. Perhaps someone will pick up this concept again and truly develop the game that will match our expectations.