Drawn to Life Review

Platformers are nothing new. Indeed, they have been around since the days of Pitfall and Super Mario Bros. While the 2D platformer genre has gone through a lot of changes since those days, one thing has generally remained the same: the entire game was preprogrammed and uncustomizable. Until now. THQ, a company not necessarily known for creativity and innovation, has yet made a game which is an exception to what they usually put out, a new DS platformer called Drawn to Life. What is so different about this game, and do those differences result in an experience engaging enough to be worthwhile? Read on to find out.

The concept of Drawn to Life is rather easy to explain. It is a generic platformer, with one significant difference. Many of the in-game elements are customizable. You will come across a paintboard in a level and be asked to design something for your hero to use, at which point you will be taken to a screen where you can literally color in the appropriate object however you so choose. I will get more into this later, but I just wanted you to know exactly what type of game we were dealing with before I moved on.

Graphically, those elements of the game which are uncustomizable are up to typical THQ standards, meaning that the game looks good but does not significantly push the limits. The animations are done well, and even your customizable hero has a significant amount of animation despite the fact that the programmers had no way of knowing what any player’s hero would end up looking like. Overall, these graphics are on the high end of the average range.

In terms of sound, the first thing you will notice is that this game, like most DS games, still uses text boxes to advance the plot rather than actual speech. The sound effects are not anything to get too excited about, and they sometimes seem to be a little more on the cute side than they should be, but they are okay nonetheless. The music for this game, on the other hand, is actually quite good. It is not on the level of addictiveness of, say, the Super Mario Bros. theme, but it is well worth keeping the sound turned on to hear in most if not all cases.

So far as gameplay is concerned, the game itself is basically what I described earlier, a generic platformer. Your hero can walk, he can jump, he can duck, and he can ground pound. As the game goes on he will gain other abilities as well. The game itself is a fun platformer despite its generic nature. Its levels are a little more lengthy than they perhaps should be given the fact that this is a DS game, but that is a relatively small gripe.

The game has fifteen levels spread across four worlds, with the last world being a level short of the other three. After you beat all the levels in a world you will have to fight a boss. The bosses are reasonably creative and are also reasonably difficult, and the four worlds in which you will adventure in are all sufficiently distinct from each other to not appear as carbon copies of each other.

I already mentioned that the levels were long, but each of them also requires a lot of collecting. The plot revolves around pages of a book called the book of life, so in each level you have to find four templates of a page of this book. Each level also has three villagers, called Raposa, that you have to find and rescue. You cannot leave a level until both of these tasks are complete. There are also three secret items in each level, but these are optional. You can always go back and find them later if you miss them your first time through.

Between levels, you will visit a hub village where you will advance the plot, be able to go to the shop to buy abilities as well as new drawing items. These sections of the game are not as exciting as the levels, but they do provide a good change of pace. Occasionally you will be able to play a mini-game also, after which you will be able to buy that mini-game in the shop to play whenever you so desire. Still, you will find yourself just wanting to get into the next level most of the time.

The true draw of this game (pun intended) is the ability of the player to customize many of the elements of the game itself. Even the hero you play with is customizable, and each profile can have up to three of them. Beyond him/her, you will be able to customize all sorts of platforms, vehicles, and other assorted things to personalize your game experience. For somebody like me who can not draw to save his life, this is not so exciting as I would generally end up just coloring in the entire model one color that would be a visible color against the background, but for those of you artists out there, there is enough here that you can have a ball with it.

When you come across something that you need to draw, you will be presented with an outline of the object in question on both screens. On the top screen will be an outline of the object against the background of the environment your hero is currently in. On the bottom screen will be the same outline against a white pad of paper. As you color in the object in the bottom screen, you can look to the top to make sure it is visible against the background, which was a very good idea.

Anything you could possibly want for customizing your objects you have here. There is a very good selection of colors that you can use, or you can buy patterns and things like that as you progress through the game. You can zoom in to get every single pixel absolutely right if you desire to take that much time, although such is only necessary for perfectionists. You will be doing a lot of these drawings, so if you are too much of a perfectionist, it will take you a very long time to get through the game.

The game actually provides a reasonably lengthy experience without the added length due to drawing objects. The fifteen levels, as I mentioned, are all quite lengthy, and the sections between levels in the village take up a decent amount of time as well. So this game is certainly long enough that you will not beat it quickly, but the true length of the game is dependent on how into your drawings you get, so I am going to judge the replay value/game length assuming an average amount of detail is put into such drawings.

Overall, Drawn to Life is a very creative concept, and it will be interesting to see how THQ and other companies expand on it during the rest of the DS’s lifespan. If you are a fan of platformers and are also an aspiring artist, this is probably the perfect game for you. If you are merely a fan of platformers, you can just color in the objects one color and still get a somewhat engaging experience from the game itself. Either way, most platformer fans will find something to like with Drawn to Life.