Scribblenauts Review

God is less of a sadist in this game than in real life.

Normally these unexpected sprints result in a swift death and failure of the level, but even when the little bugger survives he usually knocks something over. Scribblenauts boasts a detailed physics system, but unfortunately everything in the game appears to be made out of paper and string. Vital objects have a horrible habit of falling over or of dropping into water just at the wrong moment, and Maxwell has all the grace of a sea lion undergoing electroshock therapy. All too often you'll come up with a brilliant solution for a problem, and then spend half an hour failing to implement your plan. You'll soon learn which objects are easy to use and which aren't, but you never feel 100 per cent in control of what's going on. There's a huge amount of luck involved in any action that requires speed or precision, and when things do come together you'll often feel relieved, rather than triumphant.

Here's an example for you. One of the very early challenges asks Maxwell to retrieve three plants and to deposit them in a basket, under the watchful eye of a flower collector. One flower is protected by a bee, a second is on a narrow ledge at the top of a cliff, and finally there's a lily at the bottom of a small lake that contains an angry fish. On my first attempt at this quest, I started out by spawning a gun so I could shoot the bee (I know this was a bit excessive, but I was feeling playful). I instructed Maxwell to shoot the insect, and instead he unloaded a clip into the nearby flower. Mission failed.

On my second try, I spawned a swatter for Maxwell to use. He dispatched the bee, but not before suffering so much damage that he was later murdered by the fish. On attempt three I summoned a frog which ate the bee, then I flew by helicopter to the top of the cliff. As I disembarked, the vehicle crushed the flower. Mission failed. The next time around, it fell off the cliff into the lake, where it destroyed both the fish and the lily. Eventually I just flew up there using wings, but I still had to retrieve the last plant from the lake. I threw a bottle of poison in, but that didn't work. I threw in a toaster, but this also destroyed the lily. I eventually resorted to throwing cats into the water - the first one was killed by the piranha, but the second was ultimately victorious. Then when I finally jumped into the water to grab my prize, Maxwell insisted on picking up the feline first.

It's worth pointing out that every time I grabbed a flower, I had to dump it in the collector's basket. This would be fine if it weren't for the fact that she dashed up to me excitedly every time she saw that I was holding a flower. In the process, she knocked the basket over - which meant I couldn't put anything in it. Every time this happened, I had to stop what I was doing and set the basket the right way up in the vain hope that it wouldn't be knocked over by the collector, the frog, the drenched cat or by Maxwell himself on one of his mad spasms. Eventually I got rid of everything that was no longer needed (you can drag spawned items to a bin in the corner of the screen), and carefully placed the two flowers into the basket. The lily, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen. I eventually realised that the collector was actually standing on top of it, and no matter what I did, I couldn't get her to budge. At this point I finally snapped, spawned a pistol, and shot her in the face. Mission failed.

Grow a 'tache. Ride a dinosaur. Say no to drugs.

This story demonstrates everything that is good and bad about Scribblenauts. With hindsight my struggles make for a neat little tale, but at the time I was cursing till I was red in the face. At the time, it wasn't funny - in fact it was a major pain in the arse. Had I not been playing the game for review, I would have probably shut down my DS and gone to do something else. Make no mistake, Scribblenauts requires a gargantuan degree of patience, and for many the frustration will be too much to bear.

Once you've conquered a level, you're granted the option to replay it in advanced mode - wherein the player must come up with no less than three solutions to the given problem, each using a completely different set of objects. In theory, this setup should encourage smart thinking and a bout of creativity on the player's part; in practice, you're far more likely to stick to use subtle variants of objects that worked the first time - swapping your helicopter for a pegasus, a rope for a cable, and so forth. All too often I found myself scrapping clever combinations in favour of something more mundane, simply because I couldn't bear to suffer the irritation that accompanies any attempt at complex action. Indeed, the game's fiddly nature is all the more painful because it actually blocks you from seeing you imagination bear fruit. You'll think of an idea and success will dangle before your very eyes, then at the last minute it'll be whipped away as something stupid happens.

It's a heartbreaking situation, because from an outsider's perspective there's no reason why it should be this way. The combination of physics and hundreds of user-generated objects was always going to be tricky, but surely the controls could have been done a different way. Why can't we move Maxwell around with the d-pad, and why does the camera snap back to him every few seconds, obscuring our view of fun stuff going on elsewhere? These aren't minor imperfections, they're major flaws that distract us from all that the good stuff that the game has to offer - the massive library of objects, the customisation options, and the clever system that lets you unlock game worlds by buying them from an in-game store. There's even an option to create your own levels and to share them with other local users - something you rarely ever see on the humble DS. And yet when you walk away from a Scribblenauts session, all you can think about is how much better it could have been.

Despite all the issues, there will still be many people who love this game. For all its problems, it's still an incredibly fresh experience - a genuinely unique slice of creativity that shows, once again, what a brilliant little machine the DS really is. I can't deny that I'm disappointed by Scribblenauts' shortcomings, but I will certainly continue to play after this review is done - and I hope with all my heart that 5th Cell decide to make a sequel. If they do, and if they fill in all the cracks, perhaps one day we'll get a game that lives up to its true potential.