Review by: Mitch Dyer

Oh, Scribblenauts. I really wanted to like you. The super-creative premise is incredibly ambitious and your cardboard-cutout art is so cute, but the execution is flawed to the point of nearly ruining the game.

The potential of the premise is limitless: you tap any noun into the game’s keyboard, and if it fits the bill of the game’s massive list of items it’ll manifest within the world. Fire trucks, rocket ships, vegetables, weapons, God, Cthulhu, vampires, wheelbarrows, sandwiches, time machines, black holes, jetpacks… if you can hold it, ride it, throw it, eat it and otherwise use it in various fashions, Scribblenauts will let you play with it.

The purpose of the game, aside from riding a dragon while shooting lasers at zombies, is to use this thingamajig-conjuring tool to solve simple puzzles with different solutions. Basic things like rescuing a cat from its roof perch have plenty of obvious solutions, but I was surprised at how realistically the game reacted to my random inputs.

Burning the house convinces kitty to bail, and it instinctively jumps into the welcoming arms of a fireman. You can also strap wings to your back and get the job done yourself. Every time you crack the puzzle, you earn a shiny gold star and a bunch of badges to accompany a stack of cash. Once it’s been solved, however, you can jump back in and try to use different doodads to find fun or clever new solutions. Strapping on your lumberjack boots? Axes and saws will get the job done. So will pulling the tree from the dirt with a helicopter.

The problem from a gameplay perspective is that the puzzle-solving levels essentially boil down to interactive Mad Libs, but Scribblenauts goes to no effort to reward your creativity or worse – your puzzle solving ability. It doesn’t recognize when you’re thinking outside (or inside) the box, aside from giving you a useless medal image from time to time, so there’s really no incentive to ever go outside your own initial boundaries. I regularly stuck to using a gun or sword for any violent activity, a black hole to destroy items, and a jetpack to hop around.

You’ll need to type in specific items later on, say, when you need to celebrate a wedding, but for the most part you can zip through the puzzles by rehashing your old ideas, rather than waste time pondering how you can entertain yourself with new ones.

While the puzzles are dull unless you will yourself to try new ideas, the action areas are infuriating. Running around a stage trying to find the best route to your gold star involves plenty of trial and error as well as some experimentation. I once built a bridge to cross a bomb-filled gap, and was agitated when my hero, Maxwell, couldn’t cross the bridge – he just runs into it. In later levels, which become increasingly complex in their structure and objectives, the clumsy controls ended up being the reason for my absurd death count. You move Maxwell with the touchpad, which is also how you select, pick up and use items… miss your spawned creation by just one pixel and you could send Max leaping into a pool of lava or off a cliff.

There’s an obscene amount of levels in Scribblenauts, and if you’re crazy about completing every last thing you’re going to be playing this sucker forever. Ten worlds, each with its own set of stages, both puzzle and action, that can be played endlessly? That’s an enormous amount of gameplay—but I still can’t get fully behind Scribblenauts, though, no matter how hard I try. Scribblenauts succeeds in being an incredibly creative game. It just isn’t enjoyable after the effect of its initial charm wears off.