Here is yet another review. I usually don't write them so often, but I had tons of games to review so I am trying to write all of them before I forget what I have to say about the games. As usual, feel free to ignore that wall of text you see below, but if you do manage to read through all that recommend it if you like it.

Warning! The biggest review ever approaches!

A unique concept that occasionally suffers due to its ambitious scope

Chances are the ultimate dream of every single gamer out there is to witness the creation and release of a game that allows you to solve problems and kill enemies by using any method you could possibly come up with. While open-world games come somewhat close to that premise by giving players freedom of movement, letting them go wherever they feel like and do whatever they want, they fail in providing a nearly endless array of problem solving methods. Scribblenauts is perhaps the game that comes the closest to achieving that utopia, it may not possess the freedom open-world games feature, but when it is time to come out of tough situations the game's one and only boundary is the player's imagination.

Scribblenauts is extremely simplistic on its presentation like a good old-school game. There is no such a thing as a plot. There is a boy named Maxwell and his unbelievable ability to materialize pretty much anything he writes on his notepad. And that is basically all you need to do before jumping right into the many hours of head-scratching puzzles the game throws at you. A wise design decision, after all games like this one demand no explanation or opening cutscenes in order to be enjoyed.

The game is divided into ten different worlds, with the first one serving a quick effective tutorial, and within each world players will find a set of eleven puzzle levels and eleven action stages, adding up to over two hundred challenges. Puzzle levels present a problem to the players such as "Cook a meal" or "Steal the treasure without harming anyone" while action stages play like platformers where your goal is to go from point A to point B.

In order to clear the stages and acquiring the Starlite players must use the virtual keyboard in the lower screen and write any word they could possibly think of, with some obvious exceptions such as trademarks, obscene nouns, celebrities and others. The game's vocabulary features over 22.000 words and the AI programmed into the characters that can be summoned is nearly perfect. Place a police officer close to a thief and a fight will certainly begin, put meat close a lion and he will eat it, tie a chain to a helicopter and rescue NPCs from doom, the possibilities are endless.

Maxwell is controlled using the touch screen, tap into a certain direction and he will move, do an upwards motion with the stylus and he will jump, in order to interact with objects all that it takes is tapping them. The camera is controlled with the D-pad allowing players to scan through the entire stage without moving the character and objects can be placed in the screen by dragging and putting them in an area where they actually fit.

Despite being overly simple the controls will fail more often than not. It is very easy to tap an object just to have the game wrongly recognize the controls and watch Maxwell moving towards a pit of doom, and the same goes for when players try to place an object or character in the stage and the game interprets your commands as something totally different. The touch screen command recognition is very off and it definitely gets annoying as the game goes by and the stages start to require more precision and good timing.

Another issue that is easily noticed since the game's very start is the odd physics of each object. Some object's weight and density are far from behaving the way players will expect, ram a car into a larger heavier object and chances are the game's collision physics will fail badly as you watch the bigger object being dragged across the screen on a really weird fashion. The physics problems become exceptionally troubling when players try to come up with clever solutions for the puzzles and the objects summoned fail to react the way one would expect, leading to possible brilliant solutions being washed away by inaccurate calculations.

While all these problems can make the game transform into a torturous experience it is really hard not to be completely blown away by what Scribblenauts achieves. A concept that would be called an unreachable dream a few years ago turned into reality in the hands of an ambitious team of talented programmers. The puzzle stages are very enjoyable and present an endless number of solutions, however the action stages can become repetitive down the line as many of those can be solved by using a very small combination of items, but truth is very inventive players will manage to find more out there ways to clear levels.

Technically speaking Scribblenauts is undeniably refreshing on the amount of sprites and words that were squeezed into a Nintendo DS cartridge, including the different AIs for every single object that the game allows players to bring into the screen. It is easy to note though that visually the game has suffered due to that, the animations of the many different sprites are just average and the game doesn't look very impressive despite its great art direction. However, it all comes off as a worthy shortcoming that allowed the game's complexity in its vast dictionary and collection of characters.

The game's songs are extremely simple and there aren't really a lot of tunes. You will be hearing the same loop over and over again for as long as you are in the stages, regardless of the world you are visiting which makes the already uninspired tunes even more underwhelming. Musically Scribblenauts is a surprisingly generic game, a disappointing fact due to the game's amazing personality and uniqueness in pretty much every other aspect.

The game isn't limited to its single-player mode though. Gamers will be able to use a level editor and share those with fellow gamers, but the concept of a level editor ends up failing to realize its full potential. Due to very limited options players will find that most of their ideas for fantastic levels won't come into fruition. The lacking level editor is saved by a fantastic title screen where you will certainly spend many hours. The game's title screen is basically a big sandbox level where you can summon anything from the game's dictionary and watch how they will behave.

In the end Scribblenauts is a very ambitious project that suffers due to its massive scope. Although all of its shortcomings are extremely hard to ignore the game is still very enjoyable and players with great creative minds will certainly have much more fun than those who are a little short on the inventive side. The game has endless replay value as it is easy to replay all the levels in order to get more points which are awarded when players solve the same puzzles by using different methods. Overall it is a package that is easy to recommend to pretty much everyone. It is easy to get into it and its concept draws huge crowds. There aren't other games like Scribblenauts out there.

Actual Score: 7.7