You have to have patience and time to reap the rewards of the THQ’s Drawn to Life for Nintendo DS–otherwise, you won’t make anything but a clone of the Yeti from SkiFree. The main draw here is the heavy use of the stylus and, consequently, the touch screen, with which you’re expected to illustrate the hero and various objects in the world–but is it worth the effort to see your creations given animation?

Yes, for Drawn to Life is more just a sandbox, and more than glorified MS Paint. There’s a folksy plot casting the player in the role of The Creator, lead artist of an entire world…okay, maybe lead chicken-scratch designer is more like it, but at least the setting appeals. Skilled artists and animators have drawn most everything to life in ways you never could with the color-limited editor and small resolution, but the end result is that magic combination of fluid- and sharp-looking 2-D. So while your creations are going to look a tad out of place no matter how good you make them, budding artists and coloring contest entrants will enjoy the many opportunities to draw platforms, weapons, and vehicles. For the rest of us, it’s nice that they give you a lot of preset patterns with more to find as you play, in case you hate your God-given lack of artistic ability. There’s also new music, if you can find it–and you should try, because it’s surprisingly catchy goodness.

On to the problems. It would have helped your sickly creation fit in better to have a back-view for those top-down parts–say, there really are a lot of those. I thought this was a platformer/collection game… which it is, just with a mystical structure. In a 2-D game nowadays, you need levels engineered to trounce the best Flash-game offerings, and thankfully there’s enough such variety in Drawn to Life. You start in the hub of all action, the unnamed town of the Raposa creatures, which you must stop from becoming deserted by dispelling big clouds of Darkness. As you bring back the people, you’ll be able to shop, talk, and do all other manner of RPG things, but then you set out on the side-scrolling action adventure that’s the meat of the game. You can hop on heads, fire snowballs, punch, and ground-pound; you must also scrub the screen of shadow goo in each area and find the missing pages of the Book of Life. Lots to do.

More than I deign to cover in 200 words, you’ll just have to see Drawn to Life for yourself.

Posted on August 29th, 2008 by katie