Scribblenauts

First published on 5 Oct 2009. Updated on 27 Jan 2010.

Oh, Scribblenauts. Feted at the E3 games expo earlier this year, anticipated by every games scribe on the planet on the basis of your supposedly endless adaptability – how we hoped for great things from you. However, once the novelty of being able to conjure up damn near anything we could imagine wore off, we realised that you are nothing more than a good, if far from addictive, DS game.

It's not your fault - we just expected so much. Your cutesy graphics looked so adorable, as was the fact that we could conjure up so many things from the onboard memory (platypus! Shrinkray! Cthulu!). Put that sort of adaptability into a puzzle game - conjure up objects to get your character to the "starite" (or, to put it another way, "star"), thereby beating the level - and it should have been amazing. And it is, for a while, until you realise that most puzzles are less well served by that sort of adaptability than by constantly choosing "ladder" or "jetpack".

Some of the puzzles are noodle-scratchingly hard, sure, and it's a perfect pick-up-and-put down sort of a game, but we were expecting a revolution. And don't even get me started on the lack of actual scribbling...