Kombo’s Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don’t waste your time. This is why we’ve split our reviews into four sections: What the Game’s About, What’s Hot, What’s Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.
What the Game’s About
Scribblenauts is a puzzle game where everything and nothing can be the answer. You play as Maxwell, a boy who has the power to summon anything he writes. It comes in handy as you collect “Starites” and progress through the over 100 puzzles. Whereas most puzzle games adhere to strict rules and concrete methods, Scribblenauts is more about using your imagination and creativity to play in the world’s first sandbox style puzzle game. If you have a large vocabulary you’ll be putting it to the test to find elegant or extravagant answers to the puzzles questions.
What’s Hot
Give a kid an expensive toy and they will play with the cardboard box the toy comes in. While a toy might be fancy and wonderful, it limits the imagination to its specific function. A cardboard box is a blank slate and can be anything that you imagine. Scribblenauts is a lot like a cardboard box in that respect. You are given free range to chart your own course in Scribblenauts and dream up wonderful concoctions that elicit a childlike joy when your plan works and you get your Starite reward. You can look at the same puzzle a thousand different ways and you are only limited by the depth of your vocabulary to provide solutions.
That isn’t to say that Scribblenauts is all loosey-goosey; there is some structure to the game. The progression is dependent on you intelligently completing a level quickly and below the “par” of item use. The fewer items you use, the more “ollars” you make toward unlocking the next stages. It was a smart move to reign in the free-form nature of the game a hair so that there is a reward to using cleaver methods versus always setting up Rube Goldberg devices. However, at no point do you feel tricked into playing one method over another. You can keep playing the game and unfolding tiny stories within each level.
The strongest element of Scribblenauts is its story telling power. What is innovative about Scribblenauts is the fact there isn’t a story given to you but you provide one. There is never a reason given why Maxwell wants or needs to collect the Starites, you just do, but that isn’t a negative aspect as you might think. Each level feels more like a vignette and the beauty of Scribblenauts is actually the sum of all those short stories. Not just by your own doing but by the collective gaming community that indulges in this winning title. The most readily available example of this is by talking with someone else who owns the game. You’ll swap stories of how you completed a challenge and both marvel at how each of you arrived at the same goal with drastically different methods. Probably more important than this review are some of the methods that people use to solve the puzzles, and you can read those on every respectable gaming forum on the internet.
The charm of Scribblenauts is hard to express since most of it involves your own imagination. The graphical style aids to the initial appeal but the items you populate the world with are what gives the game personality. You could possibly even use Scribblenauts to look introspectively at your own creative mind. Do you use a lot of boxes and ladders or pterodactyls? You’d be surprised at how you can look at yourself when using these items. Of course, it is infinitely more fun to use unorthodox methods to solve puzzles but there might be some people who prefer the more traditional tools. It circles back to the underlying greatness of Scribblenauts; the fact that you tell your own story in context of a puzzle game is the most madly enjoyable part of the game.
What’s Not
Scribblenauts is a daring and ambitious game and it is no surprise that a few things fell through the cracks. Namely, the controls are what makes Scribblenauts not a perfect game. You control Maxwell via the stylus and you tap items to interact with them. That opens the door for a host of control issues where the game decides what to do for you. There will be plenty of times you fail an attempt after carefully setting up the scenario because of an ill placed screen tap. It keeps Scribblenauts from being a perfect game, since the control hinders the game from working like intended and hoped. There are solutions that seem logical but don’t pan out, and even when you do find a winning strategy, it might not work due to the sloppy controls.
Providing everything works well and you don’t false start your contraptions or scheme, there is only one problem with the actual creation of items: not being able to duplicate the last item you created. If you want to create some balloons to attach to something to make it float, you’ll be required to make more than one. Another problem is if one of your useful items falls into a pit or is destroyed, you’ll need to type out another one. A small problem but an annoying one at that.
Final Word
Scribblenauts is one of the best games on the DS and the most imaginative games to be released since LittleBigPlanet. The ambition is at the forefront of the game and for what doesn’t work for Scribblenauts, it is made up for the fact that you are given total command as to what happens next. Don’t waste any more time, start telling your Scribblenauts story. And be sure to leave comments on some of the coolest solutions to puzzles you mastered.
