Review: Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter (NDS)

Like its predecessor, the core concept with Drawn to Life is creating your own character to use. Not allowing as much freedom as you may hope for, it nevertheless brings your creation to life incredibly well. Essentially at the start you're given a mannequin as well as a rudimentary set of tools and it lets you draw to your heart's content. However, unless you're an artist at Marvel, the character 'drawn' on the back of the box will look nothing like what you create. Now, we're fairly competent when it comes to drawing with the stylus, but in the end, all we had was some little stick figure-like creature with a dodgy smile and blue shirt, so if you think you're going to be drawing Spider-Man then prepare for disappointment. Then when we saw it walk around the world we were quite surprised at how well it fits in.

Not just stopping there, throughout the course of your adventure you'll be asked to draw certain objects and also add colour (Okami style) to the environment. Naturally this brought out our inner child, in a way we think the developers hoped wouldn't happen. Along with our main character who we christened "Gonad", everything we drew had some sort of expletive on it. The fact that this stuff doesn't get censored makes it even more appealing. We're such children.

The gameplay switches between an open hub world, where you can interact with other characters and spend some money, to the side-scrolling levels, which require some platforming skill as well as a bit of puzzle solving and combat. At times you'll have to draw platforms to reach higher ledges, as well as specific things like a lily pad and even a lighthouse. Neither have to actually look anything like what you're supposed to draw, though (our lily pad looking more like a green puddle and our lighthouse a simple block). Weapons that you can use also get drawn by you, at which point we're not sure whether the developers wanted us to have this much free reign or were just feeling lazy. We drew quite a nice looking sword which made mincemeat of pretty much everything. The platforming mechanics have thankfully not been overlooked, as even though you've drawn your character, he still interacts with the world in a believable fashion. It may be platforming for the younger folk, but it is nevertheless a rewarding experience.

The downside with DTL: The Next Chapter comes from the plot. Normally such a thing could be ignored; in this, it's extremely difficult to do so when it interrupts the game quite frequently. It's typical fluff for the kids, as some sort of spiky looking villain comes and steals all the colour from the village. It's up to your creation to find paint within each world to colour everything in again. The stop/start gameplay is most annoying in the beginning as you have an ungodly amount of text to read; you'll be ecstatic when you actually get control, then deflated again once it's taken away five minutes later. This may be Hideo Kojima's perfect game.

With a rather lovely soundtrack in addition to everything else, The Next Chapter may not be as ambitious as 5th Cell's other game, Scribblenauts, but it is a nice little platformer that may get your artistic juices flowing. Just don't go expecting anything too deep and you may be pleasantly surprised.

Rating: 7 / 10

Words by Adam Gulliver