Scribblenauts was one of my most hyped games at E3 and before. The game looked spectacular in concept. Being able to solve puzzles with anything I could think of. When playing it at E3 everyone agreed that this was certain to be a triple A title this year. Everyone was excited for 5th Cells Scribblenauts. However, upon actual release the triple A title went down to a current aggregate score of 8.2. Basically, fans and critics agree that the game was overhyped. In this review I hope to answer the questions of how this game went from such a high standing to a low one, even after people played it.
To start off, the main point of Scribblenauts is the gameplay. Basically, one writes whatever they feel like and it appears on the screen. This brings me to my favourite part of the game, the main screen. In the main screen of the game one can have hours of fun just summoning whatever they can think of, making them battle, and doing different things like that. Which really is what entertained me the most and got me hooked when I got the game. It was just fun to experiment. After a while though, one learns the fatal flaw of this game. Once one figures out what the most powerful thing is to do tasks, everything else becomes useless. This allows me to transition into the main core of the game, the puzzles. Now there are two supposed modes of gameplay. One is puzzle and the other is action. Now the difference between them is very minimal. In fact, after playing the game all the way through I cannot really give an explanation other than one will see unique levels in each, though many times they end up looking the same. So, their two “gamemodes†just fails. Next, moving onto structure; I was very excited at the beginning seeing how it started off kind of slow and I could not wait for it to pick up. I soon found by level 4 that I was solving every puzzles with the following: God, Death, Kraken, Rope, Pterodactyl, Glue, and Chain. In fact I think I solved 99% of the puzzles using just those few items. And it is hard to stray from those few items since the levels are all so similar. It is either press a button to open a door, defeat these enemies, or gives people these things. Sometimes one gets a variation, like a race, which ends up being how fast can a wall be made. Overall it was not well thought out not putting limits on what can be used in levels. It makes the game very repetitive and very boring very fast. However, the last two levels, puzzle 10-11 and action 10-11 are quite nice.
I think the graphical style also did more harm than good for this game. 5th Cell tried for a kiddy graphic style. Which would have been great with blood. I really think that if this had been a kiddy style game with blood it would be so much better. It would be comedic, fun, and enjoyable. The target audience for this game should not have been little kids but an older crowd. I can just imagine the possibilities of a game like this is per se it was for an older crowd. I think it would have turned out much better. This game suffers the same fate as Drawn to Life. It is a good concept that is not used to its full potential.
The music, well, its repetitive, though there are 32 scores, they all mostly sound the same. The sound really is just there and is not that great of a soundtrack. Not much to say here.
Replayablility is attempted at in a few ways. One is a challenge to go through every puzzle using different items than the last time. Though, there really is not reason to do that. There is also a level editor. In which it is literally taking a level already made and adding or deleting stuff from it. It is truly half-baked.
So in the end Scribblenauts had potential to be a great game, but fails horribly because of the levels. The levels really do just kill this game. I can see the potential of this if it was more mature, designed better, and 3-d physics based. It would just be awesome. However, I think that it was a valiant effort by 5th Cell to create this type of a game. It is just that there was so much potential and it just kind of got lost somewhere. It was truly unfortunate to see such a good idea go to waste.
Overall I am giving Scribblenauts a:
7.5/10
