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Luke Stirling
Australia
Southbank
Victoria
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Scribblenauts was a game originally released for the DS. The hook (that you can type the name of almost any physical object you can think of, and it will be created in game to solve puzzles) is such an appealing notion that it's hard not to be at least somewhat intrigued. I had not played the original DS game, or its sequel, so I went into Scribblenauts Remix with little more than a vague understanding of the premise, and a dim memory of some middling reviews. Now I feel its my turn to write one of those middling reviews.
I have to give props to the creators of this game for daring to think big. Giving the players such an extraordinary amount of freedom is just daring them to find the limits of what things the game can create, and for the most part I think they do a rather good job of covering their bases. Unfortunately it feels like there's a second step missing. To demonstrate, I will try and describe the typical level.
Gameplay
Each level ranges in size from a single screen, up to perhaps 5 times that, and represents a single unique scene. In most cases the typical level asks you to populate that scene with items appropriate to the situation, and then it's done. For the first few levels I was fine with is as a tutorial, but when it became clear that most of the levels were of this variety, my enthusiasm began to wane. Fortunately, there are some levels that take it at least a step or two further, by having you create items to interact with the scene in a particular way to solve it. Those levels are by far the more satisfying to play, but they still feel like they lack something that would really bring the game to life.
It's worth noting that this game employs the use of adjectives to modify nouns, as in the DS sequel to the original Scribblenauts, Super Scribblenauts.
Graphics and Sound
A great deal of care and attention has gone into creating an appealing and consistent art style. The levels are quite varied in their themes, and are bright, cheerful, and yet not overly noisy. Animations tend towards the paper doll style of thing. While generally somewhat simplistic, they fit very well with the tone of the game. As for the sound, the music was pleasant enough, but with games like these that are not sound dependent, I tend to just mute them while I play games and listen to a podcast or something in iTunes instead, so none of it really made a huge impression on me. Overall though, I found the presentation of game to be something of a cut above your average handheld fare.
Controls
The game offers to control modes. My default choice was to go for the purely point-and-click style of interface, where everything is handled by direct manipulation of the scene. Unfortunately, I found this to be rather frustrating at times, when the character would walk to my finger rather the game detecting my desire to interact with that object instead. This may not be much of an issue on the iPad, but on devices with a smaller screen, I thoroughly recommend the alternate control scheme. This places two virtual joysticks in the corners of the screen, with the left one controlling the character, and the right one for scrolling around the level. All other interactions remain point-and-click.
Summary
I went into Scribblenauts with expectations of it being something it is not, and because of that, I came away feeling a great deal less satisfied than I thought I would. I don't think it's a bad game by any stretch, but it does seem like it could have been so much more. I suspect that I am likely quite a bit older (by two decades or so) than the target audience for this game, but I feel like putting it in the hands of younger players would not really solve the issue. I suspect that any child old enough to have a large enough vocabularly to deal with the game is probably old enough to be wanting a little more out of their games too. At the time of writing this, it has been at $0.99 for a couple of weeks, and at that price it is hard to not recommend it really, especially if one has mid school-age children who might play it. But even then, I would go into it with expectations set no higher than half mast.
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