Scribblenauts is a fairly new* game that came out for the Nintendo DS, with a rather large amount of hype (at least for me). The concept of the game is to solve puzzles in levels with the limitations of your creativity. In other words, the selling point was that you could do whatever you wanted. Unfortunately, the hype train crashed and burned. Read on to find out why Scribblenauts failed to meet expectations. *=I wrote this a while back, never got around to posting it here, this is a cross post from here So Scribblenauts' selling point is that you can solve anything by writing anything, and the things you write will come to life in visual form. If you want a "Velociraptor", you get one. You want a "Large Hadron Collider", you get one. Awesome, right? The game's magical conjuring dictionary spans over 20, 000 words, and that's extremely impressive. It's just like a dictionary, except it doesn't tell you what each word means, it simply makes the visual version of the word. You play as Maxwell, a kid who wields the powers of the conjuring dictionary. There is absolutely no story to the game. You just get put into a bunch of levels and solve them any way you can, with the limits of an "item budget" and your creativity. Really though, it just means the limits of "item budget" and the dictionary's knowledge. This brings me to the next positive point of this review (although Rant Reviews shouldn't have a lot of positive points). The title screen is awesome. It still gives you a budget, but you have no requirements to meet, just play around. It really makes you feel that you can truly do anything in Scribblenauts, that is until you start playing the core game. There are 10 worlds, and each has 11 Action Stages and 11 Puzzle Stages. The Action ones are usually straight forward, find someway to get from point A to B, while Puzzle Stages have some sort of requirement to finish the level. The Puzzle levels tend to be very frustrating. In reality, the entire game is a massive ball of frustration (bare with my metaphors, please). The controls in Scribblenauts are handled so poorly. Oh, so poorly. It renders the game unbearably frustrating. You move the camera with the D-Pad and move Maxwell by tapping with the stylus. You also move objects by dragging the stylus and basically everything except the camera is handled by tapping with the stylus. I hope no one is annoyed by the amount of times that "stylus" has been typed in this one paragraph so far. The very raging thing about the control is that the line between choosing where Maxwell should go or choosing an object is blurred to Scribblenauts. Most of the time, you'll be moving Maxwell around and it's usually around objects, which in most cases ends up with you clicking the perfectly placed object and ruining its position. Same thing goes in the vice-versa situation. Say, you want to grab a rope, which is oh so tiny. The game could think that you missed the rope and that's where you want Maxwell to go, resulting in Maxwell trotting to his doom. The controls, coupled with the stupid physics of Scribblenauts, result in very angering situations. Every object in the game, be it a truck or a pebble, they all weigh the same, and they are all floaty. On some Action Stages, the game requires you to jump over an object, like a giraffe, with the help of your magical dictionary, of course! What I did was I placed some stairs next to the giraffe, so I could leap over it. Instead of running to the top of the stairs and jumping over the giraffe, I kicked the stairs and my jump was very embarrassingly full of fail. The stairs floated upwarded and bounced to the ground. There is also a mission where you have to stop a speeding truck. I placed a pebble on the road, and then the car flipped and bounced to the ground. I failed the mission, but I succeeded by putting a fan on the road. Yes, a small fan. Fail Physics My whole point about this is that you indeed can do what you want in the game, but Scribblenauts does not react to your creativity very well. In the end, you end up solving most puzzles by resorting to the same objects you use all the time. I feel that Scribblenauts teases you in the sense that it allows you to use creative ideas to solve levels, but the results end up sucking, forcing you to use the same old objects all the time, and giving you the habit of dismissing creative ideas in-game. However, when you do have a spark of creativity and it's successful, there's no happier feeling in the world. On top of the pile of fail that is consisted of bad physics and god-awful control schemes, there is the level editor. Scribblenauts has a level editor with unused potential. In short, it sucks. It could have been something more. For starters, you can only make a level using the terrain templates of previously beaten stages. You also have a budget of things you can put in the level you're making. Basically, Scribblenauts restricts your freedom of creativity once more. What's even worse is that you can't create scripted events to beat the stage, but instead you have to make levels of linearity like the Action Stages. In conclusion, Scribblenauts is a game with potential. Wasted potential. The concept is absolutely amazing and should not be thrown away, so I hope developers should improve on this if they have the chance. In the case of Scribblenauts, it sucks. A lot. So many components of the game are done wrong, and the line is drawn at the controls, which is the very basis of playing a game. It's worth a try to anyone who wants their patience and tempers tested. Graphics: 7/10 There's really not much to say, visually. It's a 2D DS game, what's there to judge? It earns the "average" score for that. Presentation: 4/10 Ugh, the presentation is executed very poorly with scripted events and requirements restricting many possibilities. Gameplay: 5/10 Although you can spend quite a bit of time playing around in the most awesome title screen ever, the core game is not the same. Terrible physics, broken controls and repetition in using the same objects over and over is not fun at all. It earns these 5 points solely from the title screen. Sound: 8/10 The music is quite catchy, sound effects cartoonish, so that's alright. Lasting Appeal: 3/10 If you think you'll spend time making levels using templates from other levels, then sure, you'll find some replay value in that. Apart from that, I don't think you'll want to tackle the 10 worlds all over again after you're done with them, even if you had the patience to beat the whole game. Overall: 27/50
I did expect a lot of bad things said about a game seeing it's a Rant Review. I take it as it is. I won't have any criticisms for this one, for I myself liked the game, it doesn't seem like you did. Lemme just say, try to enjoy the game. And try making a REVIEW. See if it changes views.
You went in detail of the games weaknesses, but you also might want to talk about its good points. I agree though, that there was a lot more they could do with the game.
Yeah, once you do everything, and play with the editor for a bit, you can no longer play it. Barely any replay value. Still fun, though.
There is a cheat code that allows you to stop the camera resetting. I really liked this game; although the physics of objects and the controls were annoying.