Scribblenauts Remix review (iOS / Universal)

♫ “Do anything you wanna do”

This is Arcadelife’s 200th review.
Thanks to Mark Helmuth for nominating this game, it’s a great choice.

10 word description: Create any object; solve puzzles. 50 levels + sandbox. Game Center.

The game's "Start" screen is a sandbox playground where you can let your imagination run riot ... or just stage loads of dinosaur fights

10 word review: Welcome port of DS classic. Unique gameplay is constantly entertaining.

After completing the first puzzle about 20 different ways, it degenerates into dressing my character as a knight, riding a bald gorilla and trying to fight a small, evil black dragon

You will like this if you enjoy: Puzzle games involving imaginative use of objects and a bit of general knowledge trivia.

In this puzzle, I have to give the farmer 3 different farm animals. It turns out that a gigantic robotic sheep still counts as a sheep

The good news: Very nice graphics; a huge number of tools, weapons, animals, vehicles, pretty much anything you can think of. Puzzles are quite varied, generally falling into the categories of “solve this physical problem” or “create specific objects to match predefined criteria”. Completing the puzzles isn’t really the point … the point is to go back and see how stupidly you can complete them, over and over again. Sandbox mode, among many other things, allows you to create fights between any two (or more) creatures that you care to imagine. It’s amusing that you can create “God” (controversially white and male – shock, horror!) but not “Batman”. I suppose God isn’t copyrighted. God does tend to kick ass; he beat a Bagman (one of the typo prompts when I tried for Batman), Satan and a T-Rex in successive fights without losing hardly any health. It’s also possible to find the answers to some age-old “who would win in a fight between…” questions. I won’t spoil the Astronaut vs Caveman outcome for you, but it was very one-sided.

The challenge here was to refresh a thirsty person in the desert. Obviously, you could summon any kind of drink and give it to him, however I thought his own personal little rain storm would be nice

The bad news: Well, this is me being very picky, but I need to get some kind of balance in this review as it’s the 200th and someone might actually read it. I’m not knocking this game just to be clever, it isn’t perfect. Some of the puzzles are very simple, along the lines of “What items would a Fireman and a Policeman carry?” Dull stuff, with no real scope for imaginative item creation involving a Small Pink Pachycephalosaurus. These puzzles come across as word tests for primary school kids and could have been left out in favour of more of the physical puzzles where you have to build or demolish things. Also, controlling object and character movement has many of the issues that Scribblenauts had on the DS. And … the sandbox area could have been a lot bigger. Thankfully, the amount of fun that can be had tends to negate these issues.

Completing the beach party puzzle sensibly isn't as much fun as trying to kill everyone with sharks

Arcadelife verdict: A lot of the entertainment on offer here depends on your vocabulary, imagination and how silly you want to be. Personally, I like watching pink robotic dinosaurs fight giant bald gorillas and I am endlessly fascinated by seeing what I can balance on top of a helicopter. The puzzles are fun, most of them anyway, but if you have the inclination to experiment wildly with unbalanced wildlife battles, want to see how many dinosaurs God can kill in one go, or are just completely OCD about doing everything in a videogame – there’s a fair chance you’re really going to enjoy this one.

Probably not the best place to stand

Arcadelife rating: 92/100

Version reviewed by Arcadelife is 1.0

Scribblenauts Remix website link

Arcadelife played and reviewed this game on:
4th gen iPod Touch (OS 5.0)
iPad (OS 4.3.5)