Scribblenauts: This honestly could, and should, have been a really awesome game. But it just isn't. The game idea is pretty simple: You play Max. Max wants to collect the Starites. To help Max accomplish this, you type in a word into his magic notepad and "poof", said items appears in the game. And there are literal thousands of individual items you can summon this way. Sounds like the ideal game to just go wild in, doesn't it?
Well it would be if not for a few problems. The most grievous (for me) is the horrific control scheme. You move Max around using the stylus on the touch screen. You also interact with and move items you've summoned the same way. Add in Max having only one speed: Ludicrous, and a less than precise touch screen accuracy, and you have a big problem. I have died more times in this game by trying to pick up an item and having Max suddenly tear ass across the screen and off a cliff/into lava/etc. This is especially annoying with thin objects like rope, since it can be real tricky to make sure the stylus hits the item and not the background right by it.
Another issue is that nothing in the game save the ground and walls is nailed down in the slightest.
The final issue that drains what little fun is left is that a LOT of items you summon fall spectacularly short of your expectations for them. A few are pretty awesome, summoning Cthulhu to destroy your enemies is always good fun, so long as you keep your distance: He'll eat you as soon as anything else. And that's the main problems with anything you summon that is capable of thinking for itself, whether or not it'll be friendly, hostile, or indifferent to you is often times counter-intuitive, and whether or not it'll be friendly, hostile, or indifferent to whatever critter you're hoping it'll attack is pretty much a crap shoot. As for unthinking items, well they aren't much better. Weapons are clunky and unwieldy. Max fires guns like a toddler trying to use a machine gun, and swords, clubs, and the like are swung with all the grace and skill of a blind man with a ten foot pole. Vehicles are hard to impossible to control because they move like Max, as fast as freaking possible, only they're bigger. Also they have an annoying tendency to destroy mission critical items by running over them or by their weapons devastating the local landscape faster than you can stop them. Many items are useless because they lack some critical feature their real world counterparts would have. Bridges especially fail because Max can bump into them and shove them into the gap you are trying to span, assuming of course they are even big enough in the first place, which they often aren't. Seriously, imputing just "bridge" into the notepad gets you a few planks of wood barely 6 feet long. You can jump further than the standard bridge can span, assuming you can make the game recognize the jump command.
Someone, somewhere, failed amazingly with this game. I don't know if it was the playtesters or the development team or some meddling exec, but they failed HARD. This game had enormous potential, and it was wasted even worse than Voyager's. Utter and complete shit. 0/10.
