Wings + Lasso = Win
Scribblenauts was a game that I had high hopes for because of the completely crazy, innovative way you interact with the game. The slogan "Write Anything. Solve Everything." seems to hold true for the most part. There are a ton of items in this game, and you access them just by writing their name. You use those items to solve stacks and stacks of puzzles across the game's many levels, and you'll be doing everything from saving cats from roofs to battling through underground caverns to saving people being held hostage. However, when you actually start doing that whole "playing the game" thing, Scribblenauts doesn't wait long to smack you in the face with its glaring flaws.
The most obnoxious and talked about flaw of the game is the control setup. You move your character with the stylus, and only with the stylus. The d-pad, as well as ABXY all control the camera, leaving all parts of moving, jumping and interacting to your tapping skills. Now that may not sound so bad, and I can't find any words to convey just how awful this turns out, so you have to either take my word for it or not that you will repeatedly send poor little Maxwell to his untimely, and most likely embarrassing death by tapping a little bit off from what you meant to do.
These controls have the additional effect of making it very difficult to fight anything at all really. That's not so much a problem once you realize there are some characters you can summon that are capable of taking out just about anything, but that leads into Scribblenaut's second big problem. Inevitably you will have your own little arsenal of 5-10 words that you type a combination of to win every single level. Not only is this possible, but it is the natural progression of this game and by far the easiest way to play it. Once you've found the best way to do something, why would you ever do it differently? This causes the gameplay to become stale quickly, and really stifles that whole sense of creativity that you thought was going to be rewarded in Scribblenauts.
I should talk about the game's redeeming qualities - like the good looking quirky graphics and the number of levels in varied environments, and also the game's level creation aspects. However, I have never once found myself thinking about Scribblenauts without getting angry about everything wrong with it, and if I come to those good points, its only because I'm forcing myself to really look past everything else.
This is a game which could, and hopefully will, spawn a second, vastly superior attempt that takes into accounts the complaints from the first. It is still a really innovative and cool concept, but unless it gets the redo it deserves, Scribblenauts is considered in my book a bit of a failure.
