Game Review: Scribblenauts (DS)
I'll be upfront, I'm not a puzzle game sort of girl. I want action, I want battles, I want to wave exciting weapons around and look cool doing it. Alas, however, the DS in general seems to accept my beloved RPG and action games like Catholicism accepts female popes, so my system has been collecting dust for months.
But what does the DS have plenty of? Puzzle games. I was sadly reminded of this fact when I was cruising Family Video for something new to rent the other night. I waded through a sea of DS boxes, each featuring a condescending girl happily promoting obnoxious gender stereotypes from behind a pink sparkly border. "Let's cook! Let's play with pets! Let's learn about fashion!" they all smiled. "You want to solve puzzles because girls can't play anything else!"
I was leaving in disgust when Scribblenauts caught my eye. I had actually heard quite a bit about Scribblenauts, mostly because of the sensation it created at E3. Curiosity piqued, I picked the game up and hied myself away from the pets and makeup and domesticity of its neighbors.
The premise behind Scribblenauts is simple enough: You have to capture the Starite in each level. These are either locked away until you fulfill a certain goal, or placed in a difficult-to-reach area on the screen. To get the Starite, you type in the name of items -- ANY items -- that you believe will help you solve the level. So, for example, if the Starite is up in a tree, you can type in "trampoline" to bounce up to reach the Starite, or "ladder" to climb up to it, or "slingshot" to shoot the Starite down. This ability to type in just about anything you can think of and have it actually appear on the screen is what has generated most of the hype around the game. Cthulu, Keyboard Cat, a kraken, they're all in there.
And, I will say, it's pretty amazing. I had a difficult time stumping it once I could actually make it understand what it was I was writing. And this brings us to the game's first problem: The handwriting recognition is extremely poor. It wants to read every letter you write as an "L" if it's not quite sure what you've written. I spent ten minutes trying to make it understand that my "N" was not a "V," even though I was writing as clearly as possible. I ended up trying to summon a penis (dur hur), and instead it summoned Levis. This became so aggravating and slow that I switched to the keyboard.
Whenever you complete a level, your score is added up and given to you in the form of Scribblenauts currency, Ollars. Ollars are used to purchase new worlds, avatars, and music. And this is another major issue I had with the game: There just aren't many things you can buy with Ollars. By the time I finished World 2, out of 10 total, I already had enough Ollars to get all of the songs, all of the avatars, and all of the worlds, leaving me with 8 worlds to play through with nothing more to spend my Ollars on.
The avatars are especially disappointing. There are only a small handful of them, and some have been so rushed that they don't display items properly, such as their back items coming out through the chest, or they hover in the air instead of riding a vehicle. If you enjoy playing as a female character, you have a wonderful selection of being a bride, a witch, or a DJ. Other choices include an alien, a zombie, a pirate, a ninja, a robot, and a shaman. There is one "secret" avatar you can unlock by completing all 220 levels four times each, using different items each time, but this makes no sense to me -- by the time you've done this, I'm pretty sure you'd be ready to chuck the game aside because you have nothing left to do. I would've liked to have seen more avatars awarded for for reaching certain goals in the game, which would give people an incentive to play longer.
As for the gameplay itself, I found it mildly amusing at its best, teeth-gratingly frustrating at its worst. Some of the possible puzzle solutions made me scratch my head. For example, one level requires you keep food away from the ants without harming them. You can summon an anteater to eat the ants and successfully earn your Starite, but netting them makes you fail and start over.
Another issue I had was that many of the items were fidgety to use to the point where I almost gave up playing the game out of annoyance. Ropes are used in many levels, but you have to attach them exactly right or they'll hang there uselessly. Sometimes you have to attach the rope to the item first before it'll let you hold it, sometimes you have to hold the rope first before it attaches. Then other times you can't hold the rope at all for no rhyme or reason, no matter what you try. Positioning items can be equally irritating. They'll fall off what looks like flat ground, sink when they should float, spring off of you when you should be holding them, etc. Animal AI is especially hard to predict; at times you can ride a specific animal, once in a while it'll inexplicably not let you. Having your horse suddenly attack you when a second before you were happily trotting along just isn't fun gameplay.
Despite having a massive dictionary of items to summon, after a while you'll find that you start repeating the same items over and over because they work so well for certain types of puzzles, which makes the later puzzles grow wearisome in their repetitiousness. I fully realize the idea of the game is to be creative and think of different ways to solve the puzzle, but there are only a very few items that will, say, let you fly up a high cliff in a narrow area, and there are many high cliffs in narrow areas.
Scribblenauts does have a sandbox mode where you can play as an invincible character and summon anything you want, for as long as you like. This was when I had the most fun with the game. I had a blast summoning legions of dinosaurs, squee-ing in delight when I discovered that some obscureosaurus or another actually made it into the game. I'd dress the character up in summoned clothes, or see where my summoned time machine would take me.
If Scribblenauts was made to be more of an open-world type game with customizable avatars, perhaps along the lines of LittleBigPlanet, I think it'd be a huge hit. Who wouldn't have fun trying to stump the in-game dictionary? But, as it is, it's a badly-rushed puzzle game with a few bright moments.
Final Grade: C-
But what does the DS have plenty of? Puzzle games. I was sadly reminded of this fact when I was cruising Family Video for something new to rent the other night. I waded through a sea of DS boxes, each featuring a condescending girl happily promoting obnoxious gender stereotypes from behind a pink sparkly border. "Let's cook! Let's play with pets! Let's learn about fashion!" they all smiled. "You want to solve puzzles because girls can't play anything else!"
I was leaving in disgust when Scribblenauts caught my eye. I had actually heard quite a bit about Scribblenauts, mostly because of the sensation it created at E3. Curiosity piqued, I picked the game up and hied myself away from the pets and makeup and domesticity of its neighbors.
The premise behind Scribblenauts is simple enough: You have to capture the Starite in each level. These are either locked away until you fulfill a certain goal, or placed in a difficult-to-reach area on the screen. To get the Starite, you type in the name of items -- ANY items -- that you believe will help you solve the level. So, for example, if the Starite is up in a tree, you can type in "trampoline" to bounce up to reach the Starite, or "ladder" to climb up to it, or "slingshot" to shoot the Starite down. This ability to type in just about anything you can think of and have it actually appear on the screen is what has generated most of the hype around the game. Cthulu, Keyboard Cat, a kraken, they're all in there.
And, I will say, it's pretty amazing. I had a difficult time stumping it once I could actually make it understand what it was I was writing. And this brings us to the game's first problem: The handwriting recognition is extremely poor. It wants to read every letter you write as an "L" if it's not quite sure what you've written. I spent ten minutes trying to make it understand that my "N" was not a "V," even though I was writing as clearly as possible. I ended up trying to summon a penis (dur hur), and instead it summoned Levis. This became so aggravating and slow that I switched to the keyboard.
Whenever you complete a level, your score is added up and given to you in the form of Scribblenauts currency, Ollars. Ollars are used to purchase new worlds, avatars, and music. And this is another major issue I had with the game: There just aren't many things you can buy with Ollars. By the time I finished World 2, out of 10 total, I already had enough Ollars to get all of the songs, all of the avatars, and all of the worlds, leaving me with 8 worlds to play through with nothing more to spend my Ollars on.
The avatars are especially disappointing. There are only a small handful of them, and some have been so rushed that they don't display items properly, such as their back items coming out through the chest, or they hover in the air instead of riding a vehicle. If you enjoy playing as a female character, you have a wonderful selection of being a bride, a witch, or a DJ. Other choices include an alien, a zombie, a pirate, a ninja, a robot, and a shaman. There is one "secret" avatar you can unlock by completing all 220 levels four times each, using different items each time, but this makes no sense to me -- by the time you've done this, I'm pretty sure you'd be ready to chuck the game aside because you have nothing left to do. I would've liked to have seen more avatars awarded for for reaching certain goals in the game, which would give people an incentive to play longer.
As for the gameplay itself, I found it mildly amusing at its best, teeth-gratingly frustrating at its worst. Some of the possible puzzle solutions made me scratch my head. For example, one level requires you keep food away from the ants without harming them. You can summon an anteater to eat the ants and successfully earn your Starite, but netting them makes you fail and start over.
Another issue I had was that many of the items were fidgety to use to the point where I almost gave up playing the game out of annoyance. Ropes are used in many levels, but you have to attach them exactly right or they'll hang there uselessly. Sometimes you have to attach the rope to the item first before it'll let you hold it, sometimes you have to hold the rope first before it attaches. Then other times you can't hold the rope at all for no rhyme or reason, no matter what you try. Positioning items can be equally irritating. They'll fall off what looks like flat ground, sink when they should float, spring off of you when you should be holding them, etc. Animal AI is especially hard to predict; at times you can ride a specific animal, once in a while it'll inexplicably not let you. Having your horse suddenly attack you when a second before you were happily trotting along just isn't fun gameplay.
Despite having a massive dictionary of items to summon, after a while you'll find that you start repeating the same items over and over because they work so well for certain types of puzzles, which makes the later puzzles grow wearisome in their repetitiousness. I fully realize the idea of the game is to be creative and think of different ways to solve the puzzle, but there are only a very few items that will, say, let you fly up a high cliff in a narrow area, and there are many high cliffs in narrow areas.
Scribblenauts does have a sandbox mode where you can play as an invincible character and summon anything you want, for as long as you like. This was when I had the most fun with the game. I had a blast summoning legions of dinosaurs, squee-ing in delight when I discovered that some obscureosaurus or another actually made it into the game. I'd dress the character up in summoned clothes, or see where my summoned time machine would take me.
If Scribblenauts was made to be more of an open-world type game with customizable avatars, perhaps along the lines of LittleBigPlanet, I think it'd be a huge hit. Who wouldn't have fun trying to stump the in-game dictionary? But, as it is, it's a badly-rushed puzzle game with a few bright moments.
Final Grade: C-