Scribblenauts Showdown still looks like a 3DS game, with Maxwell and company looking the same as always.
They aren’t even as fun as the ones in past games too, which required much more creative solutions to fill up the log.While the art style is faithful to the series, the move to more capable hardware hasn’t resulted in better looking sprites or graphics. As much as the free-form gameplay of Scribblenauts lends itself to open-ended gameplay, there’s only so much you can do with eight stages. You’ll likely blaze through them in a few hours, possibly faster if you use the in-game hints. There’s also the problem that eight stages with 10 Starite log entries each doesn’t exactly give you a ton of stuff to do.
It’s pretty much the classic formula, where you’re free to pick from eight different themed stages to let your creativity go to town.The goal is to fill up the Starite Log, which nets you unlockable characters and customization options, but anybody who’s played the series before knows that it’s much better to spawn weird stuff and experiment with the game’s mechanics. One would think that a multiplayer-centric game would have covered both.Thankfully, if you’re looking for some old-school Scribblenauts then you could always load up Sandbox mode. While great as a local party game, it’s a huge bummer if you have friends down to play but unable to come over. For a game without much depth in the first place, unlocking everything does help to give some much-needed replayability.Incredibly, there’s no online multiplayer in Scribblenauts Showdown. You earn custom parts from playing but some are only unlocked by completing objectives or by spending Starlites, earned from playing the Versus or Showdown modes. If you’re not interested in the board game trappings of Showdown mode you can always opt to play Versus mode, where the minigames are just queued one after another.You can also try your hand at creating a custom Scribblenaut, one that can be used in all the other game modes. Sure, it’s funny to see a character ride a pig or serve people fangs, but the novelty wears off after a bit. There’s even a handy helper that spells out suggestions based on the words you’ve selected, cutting the amount of time spent typing.Overall, though, the Scribblenauts twist doesn’t seem all that substantial or innovative. Other stages have themes you’ll need to work with, such as terms associated with a vampire.Entering words is easy and painless due to the game’s ingenious word wheel, which groups letters into groups of four. For instance, in Super Sprint you’ll need to create a mount based on what letter of the alphabet was randomly chosen. That makes repetition a major issue here Scribblenauts Showdown should have at least four or five times more party games than it currently does.They did manage to have some Scribblenauts influence during the party games, letting you spin a wheel to decide what word or phrase will affect the next one.