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Review

Scribblenauts

82%

Format Nintendo DS

Developer 5th cell

Publisher Warner Bros. Interactive

Genre Puzzle

8-Oct-2009 Can the most ambitious game of the year live up to the hype?

51 Comments

You probably wont be too surprised to hear that Team ONM play an awful lot of videogames. Most of them, unfortunately, are deeply average. Unoriginal, poorly made, broken, frustrating, cheap or, more often than not, just plain boring. Reviewing games for a living might sound like a pretty good gig on paper, but in reality it can be a bit of a slog at times. Consequently, when something comes along that we've genuinely not seen before, or that looks to be cut from a particularly classy length of cloth, we tend to get pretty excited.

Things tend to go one of two ways following that first rush of blood to the head after seeing an early version of a potentially killer game. Either the final version turns out to be every bit as brilliant as we'd hoped (see Super Mario Galaxy, De Blob, Wii Sports Resort) or early promise gives way to epic disappointment (see Facebreaker, Sonic Unleashed).

Occasionally though, it's a case of 'nearly, but not quite'. And this, alas, has turned out to be the case with Scribblenauts. Its astonishing, ambitious premise promised a groundbreaking classic, but the final game just comes up short, delivering an excellent but flawed near miss that flirts with greatness but is hobbled by some infuriating design decisions and buggy gameplay.

You play as diminutive hero Maxwell who inhabits a bizarre world in which whatever he scribbles down magically appears. He has to use this power to either solve various puzzles (in the game's 'puzzle mode') or retrieve 'starites' from various hard to reach locales (in the game's 'action mode'). It's a bold and brilliant idea. For example, if a starite is stuck up a tree, as it is in the game's now famous first level, you can scribble down the word 'ladder' and use that to retrieve it. Or you could write 'chainsaw' and cut the tree down. Or 'gasoline' and 'match' and burn it to the ground. The possibilities, it seemed, would be endless.

Write On The Money
To start with, it's every bit as fun, freewheeling and innovative as it sounds. Many of the puzzles genuinely have countless solutions and gleefully experimenting with possible solutions is just as enjoyable as nailing it first time out. Indeed, there are moments when this reviewer wanted to stand on his chair and punch the air when a particularly convoluted, clever, funny, or in some distressing cases, violent plan paid off.

Scribblenauts is at its best when it keeps things simple, such as with the aforementioned 'tree' level, or when tasked with getting a football past a goalkeeper, starting a car with a dead battery or protecting a plate of food from some ants. It's in these levels where you are genuinely free to let you imagination run riot and write your own rulebook. Later on though, when the stages start to get more expansive and the challenges more obscure, the gameplay starts to collapse under the weight of its own unrealistic ambition.

The biggest problem is that things get so difficult so quickly that you're forced to abandon your more elaborate flights of fancy and knuckle down to simple survival. Despite the promise of hundreds of way to solve a puzzle, it quickly becomes clear that for the majority of the game's 200 odd stages this is simply not the case. You soon realise that, with a few exceptions, there are a set number of crucial items you'll rely on over and over again: rope (for attaching things together, climbing or pulling objects), a helicopter or jetpack (for flying over gaps), a black hole (for despatching foes or obstacles) and a toaster (for making water safe to swim in).
Once this happens and the opportunity for genuine creativity is diluted, the fun factor ebbs away and you're left with a fairly straightforward action puzzler.

Out Of Control
And unfortunately it's a straightforward action puzzler that's often rendered massively frustrating, thanks to some really irritating controls. Maxwell is guided around entirely via the stylus. You point where you want him to walk and he'll duly oblige. Well, we say 'walk'. We actually mean 'blindly dash'. You will die countless times through no real fault of your own as Max leaps off platforms into lava pits or into a battle he can't win because of the infuriatingly tactile, overly sensitive controls.

Another major bugbear is the decision to make the screen snap back to Maxwell after a few seconds when you are scrolling around the stage with the D-pad to check out the nature of the challenge ahead. You can be trying to delicately attach a blob of glue to a stalagmite or tie a rope to a cow's hind leg at the far end of the stage when the screen snaps back to our hero, ruining your good work or, in some cases, resulting in you failing the stage. It's maddeningly stupid and impossible to turn off. Similarly, the lack of an option to zoom out and survey a level from afar is also a bewildering oversight.

Physics are another major problem. It was probably hopelessly unrealistic to expect 5th Cell to be able to attribute realistic physics to every noun in the dictionary, and indeed they have failed to do so. Skateboards fail to roll down hills, ropes swing around wildly as if possessed and non-lethal objects can cause inexplicable deaths. In one level, we successfully dodged a falling boulder only for Maxwell to keel over dead as a doornail when we tried to walk over it after it had come to rest. It's also all very buggy. We lost count of the number of times we managed to glitch our way through an entire stage by finding some strange hole in the code.

On The Bright Side
Looking at the very respectable score we've awarded the game, you might think that we've been unduly generous then. Well, aside from these (albeit rather serious) niggles, Scribblenauts has so much going for it. The core game is a massive challenge and it'll take you a serious chunk of time to crack all 220 levels. On top of that, there's also a brilliant level creator (which we actually enjoyed more than the core game - see the panel on page 93 for more) and an interactive title screen where you can squander hours doodling around, testing the game's vocabulary, dressing Maxwell in absurd costumes and, as you may remember from our preview back in issue 46, setting off ridiculous battles between various ill-matched creatures.

True greatness is well within Scribblenauts' grasp. We can't wait for a sequel which corrects those control deficiencies, irons out the bugs and takes a more sensible approach to level design. In the meantime, if you can ignore its shortcomings there's a brilliant, inventive DS game to enjoy here that will constantly surprise and delight. It's a unique game that everybody should try, even if they might be left a little disappointed by what they find.

Fred Dutton

A brilliant premise which offers hours of fun, but ultimately falls foul of its own ambition.

Bold, ambitious premise

Enormous vocabulary

Lovely design aesthetic

Masses of content

It just doesn't always work

Screenshots

Interactive

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Posted by Evosnake

Awh, i was hoping this would at least get a gold award.
I played it early and all of my friends were fighting over the ds shouting 'TYPE IN JETPANTS!' etc.
Its an ace game, might pick it up tommorow.
:)

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