Do you have what it takes to get a review published right here on Kotaku? Steven does, as he writes obscenities in vain.
Yes, that’s right, we’re now publishing reader reviews here on Kotaku. This is your chance to deliver sensible game purchasing advice to the rest of the Kotaku community.
And thanks to the very kind chaps at Madman Entertainment, purveyor of all kinds of cool, indie and esoteric film, the best reader review we publish each month will win a prize pack containing ten of the latest Madman DVD releases.
This review was submitted by Steven Bogos. If you’ve played Scribblenauts, or just want to ask Steven more about it, leave your thoughts in the comments below.
Scribblenauts (DS)
Write anything, solve everything is the slogan of 5th Cell’s puzzler Scribblenauts, which puts you in the shoes of Maxwell, a man with a magic pencil that makes anything he writes appear. But does this ambitious little game have the ‘write stuff,’ or is it one better left on the drawing board?
Loved
Write anything, well, almost anything: The most impressive feature of Scribblenauts is its vast library of words, which is rumoured to be well over 20,000. As well as all of the standard fare you’d expect to see, it has a huge variety of oddities, memes and pop culture references, such as the giant enemy crab, keyboard cat and vampire hunters.
Choose your warrior! One of the most entertaining aspects of the game is to forsake the puzzles and simply pit creations against each other in vicious death matches. Could Einstein on a velociraptor with a laser pistol beat Rick Astley in a hover tank? Now you can find out!
Hated
Concept not completion: Everything about Scribblenauts screamed ‘unfinished tech demo’ to me. First off, there’s no story. Unlike other puzzlers such as Layton, or Puzzle Quest, Maxwell simply goes from place to place doing chores for random strangers.
Control Freak: There’s no two ways about this one, the touch screen controls in Scribblenauts are horrid. More often than not you will send Maxwell face first into a wall of spikes, as you furiously attempt to interact with a smaller object.
Quantity over Quality: The interactions between many summoned objects are very basic, and often broken. Some good examples were when I couldn’t put a baby in a baby carriage, or attach a horse to a chariot.
Scribblenauts is something worth checking out, it’s fresh and exciting, something hard to come by in the overcrowded DS market of horrible games spelled with inexplicable ‘Z’s’. However, once the novelty wears off, it makes for a game that’s better rented or borrowed.
Reviewed by: Steven Bogos
You can have your Reader Review published on Kotaku. Send your review to us at the usual address. Make sure it’s written in the same format as above and in under 300 words – yes, we’ve upped the word limit. We’ll publish the best ones we get and the best of the month will win a Madman DVD prize pack.
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