Scribblenauts Review: Frustrating and Fun, But Mostly Frustrating
Scribblenauts is one of the biggest Nintendo DS games to come out in a while. It’s been closely followed by many, and the hype surrounding it is undeniable. Unfortunately, the wait has not been worth it – the game’s only redeeming qualities are its level editor and its huge dictionary of items.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Scribblenauts’ premise, the idea here is that you type in an item, hit enter, and then boom – it appears. This is fun to play around with for about a half hour, but then you realize something – it’s pretty hard to think of every item you want to spawn at once. This is when you’ll go to the main mode of the game, Challenge Mode. Challenge Mode consists of 10 worlds, which contain 11 levels each. This brings the level total to 110. However, there are two types of levels: Puzzle and Action. You can switch between the two at any time, and each has its own set of levels, so in total, there are 220 levels. Not bad at all. But there’s a catch.
Unfortunately, a good portion of the levels in Scribblenauts are just way too easy.
To complete a level, you must guide the game’s protagonist, Maxwell, to the appropriately named starite, which is simply a star-shaped item. Upon picking up the starite, the level is complete. A great deal of the levels in both the Puzzle and Action modes are just mind-numbingly easy. It’s not hard to spawn groceries and money to buy them with to complete a level, but it’s also not fun. These levels feel like complete gimmicks that attempt to make you think, but ultimately come off as a lack of effort. The level design could have been vastly improved.
However, when you do come across a fun level with some challenge to it, there’s a good chance that you won’t go very far before dying. This is due to the game’s terrible controls. You simply touch the area where you want Maxwell to go. Unfortunately, you also manipulate items by touching them. Some items are constantly moving, such as a dangling rope (especially a dangling rope), and if you don’t touch it precisely, you can do nothing but watch as your character runs toward the item, often resulting in death. This can be due to falling (usually), running into a monster, or just accidentally triggering a trap. This is the game’s biggest issue, and it is so incredibly frustrating that it can make some people put the game down for good.
As for the game’s visuals, the game generally looks good, with a cutout drawing-type style that suits the game pretty well. However, the frame rate doesn’t always keep up, and there are pretty significant bouts of slowdown whenever a lot of moving items are involved. Despite all this, the presentation ends up being one of the high points of the game, with vibrant colors and interesting, varied environments.
There are also a number of glitches in Scribblenauts. For instance, ropes can pull items through some doors, including starite. This completely breaks a good portion of the levels, seeing as how the developers designed many of the game’s levels so that you must complete tasks that open doors. Behind those doors is the starite. Also, collision detection is completely ridiculous, sometimes catapulting you through walls if you get squeezed against something. For a title with this much hype, a little more effort on the development side of things would have been nice.
Another issue that the game struggles with is rewarding the player. Upon completion of a level, you will receive “Ollars”, which are the game’s form of currency. You get more Ollars for completing a level with less items, in less time, and with more style. Let’s start off with the item limit. Each level has a “par”, and the more items under par you are, the more Ollars you receive. This completely contradicts the game’s motto of “Write Anything, Solve Everything”. What’s the point of catapulting a rock at starite to knock it down when you can just spawn yourself a jet pack to fly up to it? Unfortunately, most levels can be solved using only rope and a pegasus, and there’s not much of an incentive to use anything new. The style reward seems like it would remedy this problem, but unfortunately, that’s not the case.
Earning Ollars isn't quite as fun as it seems.
The amount of Ollars you receive as the result of a style bonus are synonymous with the amount of badges you earn at the end of a level. You’ll get badges for using an item you’ve never used before, riding an animal, and using fire to take out your enemies. Unfortunately, you only receive about 10 Ollars per badge, so the style bonus proves to be almost completely useless.
The final criteria that determines the amount of Ollars you earn is the time bonus. This is by far the worst of the criteria, simply because it forces you to rush through a level if you’d like to get more Ollars. You won’t have enough time to think about new solutions, so it’s usually more profitable to just re-use your proven solutions over and over again.
With all these Ollar bonuses, you’ll find yourself with more Ollars than you know what to do with. You can buy extra music tracks for the level editor and you can buy different characters to play as, such as a pirate or a ninja. While these extras are nice, it feels like they were really just tacked on at the end so that you’ll have something to spend your Ollars on. Ollars are also required to unlock new worlds for both Puzzle and Action mode play. This means that if you find yourself low on Ollars, you’ll have to switch between both the Puzzle and Action modes frequently if you want to proceed with the game. This is a very poor design choice that really brings an abrupt halt to the pacing of the game.
On a more positive note, the game’s one redeeming quality is its level editor. This brings some real creativity to an otherwise lifeless game, and it’s pretty fun to create obstacle courses that you can share with your friends via local play or Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. It would be really great if you could download levels from anyone in the world without having to get their friend codes, but at least the support is there.
Scribblenauts is a polarizing game. If you’re creative, and you happen to experience the level editor first, you will love this game. If not, and you come into it expecting a well-structured game, you’ll be disappointed. Scribblenauts is a decent game that delivers on its promise, but not much more.
Leave a Reply