Scribblenauts for Nintendo DS Reviews by Gamers

So it's easy to see where all the focus was on this game. While it's unique, inuitive, quirky appeal makes you want it the actual play of the game makes you wish you hadn't wasted the money.

Let's make this easy

Positive:
Fun and straight forward.
Write anything to create weird solutions to problems.
Amusing when you're bored.
The middle ground is the graphics, it's DS so it's not expected to be great but they do make good use of the graphics available.

Negative:
Controls! Let's say you want a rope and it appears over a ravine or a monster. You try to click on this rope but somehow the game misreads your drag as a tap and suddenly you go running to your death. Start over! Annoying when this happens more than 3 times.

Item placement. You can't place items where you always think you should be able to. Ropes and chains don't attach to everything they should and glue does not work on some things.

Size means nothing. Bridges are smaller than cars. Flagpoles are larger than bridges. There is no way to build something to cover a gap. "truck" has less power than "supercar" and equal to "car".

Hints? More like what a single developer thinks are hints at 4am when they ran out of energy drink 13 hours earlier.

Let me give you the moment when I hated this game. A dinosaur is walking away from its egg. Hint: Hatch the egg before mom returns. So you figure just hatch the egg but when you go over there mom ALREADY RETURNED. Now how about we lead her away. Yay! Nope she goes right back. How about blocking her off from the egg. That works! Now how about we just tap the egg? The dinosaur hatched! Then it killed me. Try Again. Same thing but with a hammer! The dino baby killed me again. How about a gun! Still killed me. How about we start trees on fire and just leave it at that. Wait, that hatched the egg? Wait you have to hatch the same egg twice? What?! How did that get me the star?

Now take that scenario and make nearly 75% of the puzzles exactly that complex and vague.

I like this game a lot. It's very addictive. But at the same time, it generates a lot of frustration. After a few hours, I had to put it down. I can either see giving this another shot or skipping it forever.

I played maybe 30-40 puzzles and felt clever for coming up with a lot of objects and ideas.

Good
- You feel clever coming up with solutions based on objects you insert
- The puzzles are really challenging.
- It has a huge vocabulary -- though things doing always work how you want them to. If you want a little red wagon, "wagon" doesn't get you that -- it gets you an 1800s version of a pioneers' wagon.

Bad
- Some puzzles are ideal for 3 year olds -- "What kinds of objects would a cook use? A pan? A spatula?"
- The graphics are horrible. The fun of inserting objects is tempered by your imagination trying to imagine that's what they actually look like drawn crudely in a 2D side scroller.
- Sometimes you spend untold time trying to position objects and they crash on you so you spend more time setting them up. A few ladders don't stack up so you spend time trying to rotate them and stack them again. Not fun.
- Without proper names, it takes away some promise. It should have Batman, Superman and other WB characters.