Review: Scribblenauts (DS)

Posted on 13. Oct, 2009 by Chris Evans in DS, Featured, Reviews

5th Cell have come a long way since their beginnings as a ‘developer for hire’, making licensed mobile games. While they were still finding time for original titles from their establishment in 2003, is was Drawn To Life in 2007 and Lock’s Quest last year that really gave them an identity of their own. Both titles featured a focus on customisation and creativity that has quickly become the small developer’s calling card.

Their new title, Scribblenauts, takes this style to a level that few would even attempt. Hidden inside that little cartridge is a database of tens of thousands of objects, people and creatures all of which can be summoned into the game to be used as you see fit. It may be a tired old cliché, but it really does feel like the only limit here is your imagination. The list includes everything from football to trampoline to God to black hole to T-Rex to Large Hadron Collider to jetpack to rocket launcher to keyboard cat and just about everything in-between and beyond. You can have more fun just messing around on the playground-like start screen than you will in most other games in their entirety.

But what to do with all this freedom? Well, there are two types of level to unleash your creativity on. Puzzle levels give you a task, presenting you with a ‘Starite’ on completion. These tasks can be as simple as helping someone get a cat down from a roof or breaking a piñata, or as complex as conducting a murder mystery and trading with aliens. Action levels are more like a platform game, with the Starite in plain view, but with obstacles and enemies blocking your path. Considering the freedom the game gives you, the level design does a good job of still offering a challenge, but it’s all too easy to rely on small number of objects to complete any task you’re presented with. There isn’t much that some combination of a rope, a helicopter, a gun and Cthulu can’t deal with. Bonuses for using new objects encourage you to experiment, but sadly many items don’t work as you would expect and it’s all too easy to slip back into a routine.

The area where Scribblenauts really lets itself down though is sadly one that could easily have been fixed before launch. The game is endlessly plagued by a series of catastrophic design choices that constantly interfere with the experience. One such choice is for the camera to snap back to Maxwell, your character, after a few seconds of no control input. This means that if you set something up away from him, a regular occurrence when enemies are around, you’ll often miss the result as the camera zooms back across the level. Worst of all though are the movement controls. The d-pad is assigned to the camera, meaning you move Maxwell by tapping on the screen, which is also used to position and interact with objects, making simply standing still a challenge all of its own. I lost count the number of times I carefully set everything up, only for one wayward tap to send Maxwell sprinting off a cliff or into a lava pit. To call it frustrating would be to put it mildly.

It’s no exaggeration to say that this could easily have been a landmark game. As it is, Scribblenauts is a fantastic achievement, and realising such an ambitious design should be applauded. Sadly however, the mechanics of the concept are let down by poor execution, resulting in a mere shadow of what this game could have been.

Oh, Chris. I had hoped you wouldn’t use the imprecise controls as a stick to beat Scribblenauts with. Looking at some online reviews of the game, you’d think that the controls are singularly dreadful and game-ruining. They aren’t. Make no mistake- if this was a platformer, then the finicky stylus-only input would be a major problem. However, this is not an out-and-out platformer- the heavily puzzle-oriented nature of the gameplay coupled with the brevity of the levels mean that the occasional untimely death due to the controls is more of a minor (if persistent) irritation than anything else.

Scribblenauts is not only the ultimate sandbox game, in the truest sense of the word- it’s a glimpse into a new era of videogames where the game bends to the will of the player, rather than the other way around.

Scribblenauts is a landmark game. It’s stimulation for the imagination like no other game can provide. And, to think, 5th Cell made this in just over a year. Imagine what they’re capable of if given a little longer? For those unsure of whether to take the plunge, let me make this easy for you:  Scribblenauts is essential for every DS owner, and it’s free-form create-anything gameplay, while imperfectly implemented, represents the single greatest innovation in videogames in quite some time.