Scribblenauts Review [DS]

Scribblenauts came out of this year's E3 Expo full of great expectations. This was the little DS game that could! Editors and journalists around the world was hyped up to the point of tears after the realization that you could type or write “Keyboard Cat” and it would appear in the game.

Developed by the talented folks at 5th Cell Media, the same developers behind the Drawn to Life series on the DS, you can expect a unique sense of style and creative gameplay. Scribblenauts is at its core, a puzzle game. You're tasked to navigate and solve each level's puzzles by creating tools that will help Maxwell, your "Scribblenaut" achieve his objective. Tools are created by simply writing in what you would like to appear. Examples such as Keyboard Cat, and Bulldozer will generate a cat playing a keyboard or a construction vehicle.

You can start messing around with Scribblenauts right from the opening screen. Even before the player gets started solving puzzles, he/she can write anything they can think of in the title screen to understand how the text input works and the sheer size of the lexicon. Short of obscenities and copyrighted words (no Ghostbuster(s) but Ghost Hunter will work), the player is free to try any noun in the English dictionary. A total of 22,802 words exists in the Scribblenauts library, which is to say the least, astounding.

Despite having a very original concept, the developers made some design choices that ultimately hinders the game from being great. I admit that I'm not Sherlock Holmes when it comes to solving puzzles but I did grow up playing adventure games where puzzles was the equivalent of dual-weilding guns by today's standards. The puzzles in Scribblenauts are rather inconsistent. With over 10 "worlds" to explore that each have over 20 levels, there is a lot of content here. But within all that content, frustration seems to be the underlying common denominator. Be it that you fail a level without any hint as to why or when you would use "aircraft" vs. "aeroplane" vs. "airplane". But the most frustrating thing of all has to be the control scheme. It makes perfect sense that text input is done via stylus, the controls for Maxwell is also assigned to the stylus. This means you control Maxwell in a very similar fashion to traditional point and click. Obviously, the results are inaccurate and sometimes unplayable when the character falls into a pit instead of reaching the tool you summoned for him.

Even though there is a lot of replay value in the game - especially with the level creator and the ability to download other player created levels via Nintendo's Wi-Fi Connection. The question is whether you're going to want to continue fighting with this game after you've made it through the main story. Scribblenauts is a great idea and a perfect piece of demo software but when it comes down to functional gameplay, it's severely lacking in the areas that matters most. If anything Scribblenauts is great at, it's a perfect teaser for Scribblenauts 2.