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Equal Parts Animal Crossing and Magic Pengel With A Touch Of Mario

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 33 / 42
Date: September 14, 2007
Author: Amazon User

You play the game as "The Creator" and it is your job to save a small village of people/creatures/things by drawing the pizzazz back in to their little world which has become dark and gloomy and rescuing the townsfolk. Well this sounds kind of cool doesn't it? Too bad it's really not.

The game opens up with the pages of a book that apparently has been destroyed by one of the villagers who has gone evil. You are prompted to draw a few things, and I'm not sure what bearing they have on the gameplay yet, and then you are thrown in to a little Animal Crossing like world that is gloomy and fenced off with patches of dark fog. They talk about some nonsense for a while and eventually you get around to drawing a "hero" which you can pretty much do anything with. You're given a certain space built up of smaller regions that you can neither draw outside of or leave an individual region blank. This is to assure that your hero has 2 "legs", 2 "hands", a "head", and so forth. Naturally you can give them round stubs for hands and pineapples for legs if you wanted to but certain bits have to be there. There are also predrawn templates you can simply alter to your tastes or use them as they are. All in all I would say the drawing tools are simple but effective. You can zoom in/out, use a fill tool, there's a couple of different pencil widths, and there's a stamping tool. For the stamps and templates you only start with a given number and the rest must be unlocked. Once done, you may alter your hero whenever you see fit so don't worry about it too much.

So you've got your hero and you may now be saying to yourself, "Well he/she/it certainly is ugly" and you'd be right. Your drawn hero only has the 2D view and kind of flails around. This makes for a poor contrast to the rest of the game sprites since they all have a back, front, and side view. Whatever though, it works, it's just not pretty. With your hero you can now move on in to the saving of townsfolk and the recovery of the pages from the book of life. You enter in to side scrolling platform levels with your hero and there's really nothing new here. You jump on enemies to kill them, you can slide down hills to kill them, you collect coins for spending later in town, and you bounce around like this achieving various goals. There's really no additional flare to what it basically Mario 3 with the exception that every so often you are asked to use your drawing skills to move on. For example you may have to draw clouds that you can jump on. You also get various weapons which you are allowed to design yourself but I still found myself jumping on enemies more often than not even with weapons. The mechanics are a little wonky, your character seems to skate around and something about the feel of the movement is just slightly awkward.

Ultimately though this game boils down to being a mediocre game in all respects with drawing as a distraction. You could spend plenty of time making things look cool and pretty but every second you're drawing you're not really playing the game. If you wanted to draw like this you could simply hop on MS Paint and play Animal Crossing or Mario when you're done with that. I would call this game a "pass" unless you're hard up for a new DS game.

This game is awesome!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 15 / 16
Date: September 18, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This is a great game! You can draw your own character and parts of the levels. The Drawing Tool is in depth, you can zoom in and edit each pixel, flood fill, lock colors and choose from a bunch of different stamps and patterns... I've been playing this game for awhile and still haven't unlocked everything!!! It has a cool story and interesting characters, and the music is amazing!

I'd recommend Drawn to Life for anyone who likes to doodle or draw, or anyone interested in a fun side scroller. It's not perfect (Sometimes the levels / village feel too long) but it has a ton of replayability due to all the stuff you can draw.

Strictly average, but maybe fun for a younger audience

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 6 / 9
Date: September 22, 2007
Author: Amazon User

In my ongoing quest to keep myself from constantly remembering that Halo 3 comes out in 3(!) days, I picked this up a little while ago. I'd rate this game as flatly average, but maybe exotic enough to justify picking up anyway.

You play as "The Creator," a not-apparently-too-omnipotent deity for a bunch of cute furry things, the Raposas. Darkness has come to their land, and it is up to you to restore its color through your creative powers. Using the touchscreen, you "draw to life" things the Raposas need, such as the sun, crops, etc... Additionally, you craft items, tools, and conveyances for yourself to get through the world. To do this, you must first acquire pages from the "book of life" by venturing out into the darkness with your avatar, "The Hero," and recovering the pages from the malevolent forces that have closed in.

Adventuring outside the village takes the form of a standard platformer, and this is the game's biggest problem because I'm willing to wager that many players will consider this to be the crux of the actual game. The platforming isn't bad, it's just not original---it seems obvious to me that the designers didn't want to scare people away from the fun drawing game by making the action game too hard. The platforming feels too long because the drawing game occurs in the middle of levels from time-to-time. For someone accustomed to a "level" in a platforming adventure being about a ten-minute experience, that's a little draining. Sure, it's a DS game so you can always slap the lid shut and go, but that's hard to get used to, especially when stopping mid-game can make you lose your mental map of the area. Speaking of which, for a game that involves drawing unique items, the level designs are pretty repetitive. This is something that they could have done better... At least give me the ability to draw trail markers into the world so I can realize more easily that I'm retracing my steps.

It's clear that they spent the most time on the drawing aspect of the game, and this was done well enough. There are certainly no hardware problems, which is good; the DS screen supports this type of gameplay perfectly well. The drawing toolbox is good but a little sparse; I would have liked a couple of power tools like a pixel-mixer, color-replace, cut-copy tool, or even a blur filter if they were feeling sassy. The most powerful tool in my kit is the lock tool, which allows me to designate one color at a time as 'locked' and therefore unmodifiable, which makes clean edges easier to obtain. Photoshop... this is not. Also, and this is a minor nitpick... Given the amount of time you spend in this screen, I would have liked more than one music theme for "Hey, let's draw!" If I'm trying to race down a mountain and I'm sketching myself a quick snowboard to do the job, I would have done the music tense, not jaunty.

What the game does get right is the use of the drawings. The game has you draw many elements of the world, including your own avatar, the vehicles you use, the weapons you wield, and even the game's title screen. The game screams "customize me," and that's enjoyable. Thematically, the game is a little kiddish, and possibly even---surprisingly---a little art-confused. Since the toolkit you're given is more on par with Mario Paint, most of the drawings you do come off looking very "Crayola fun day." This makes your own creations stand out in sharp contrast to the higher detail of the game's built-in art, which looks more like "Secret of Mana." If I'd been the director, I'd have themed this one more like "Yoshi's Story" to make it easier for the player's work to blend into the scene. On the other hand, the decision they made causes the player's art to stand out more, which may have been the goal all along.

To sum up? This game is fun enough, but it won't hold my attention when Halo 3 comes out. I can't say anything bad about a feature that allows me to play through the game as Sephiroth in powered armor wielding a gun that shoots exploding acorns. If I don't finish this game, it won't be a failure of the titular drawing feature but of the mind-numbing platforming. But overall, I'm impressed. I generally find drawing and coloring to be an entertainment experience on a level somewhere between watching paint dry and mowing the lawn; the fact that I haven't dissolved this game in turpentine and wandered off to kill my thirty-eight thousandth Spartan is testament to the good work the developers did.

The conclusion I draw: Pick it up on discount when you're bored. Or buy it full price, either to encourage the industry to try and refine this idea or to give to a young player in your life who may not remember what platforming felt like in "Super Mario Bros 3."

An Artful Adventure

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: September 26, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Drawn to Life is more than a gimmicky use of the DS touch screen. This game has a lot of depth in both the story and platforming mode. While it may be targeted at children, it has plenty to enjoy for maturing gamers as well. The fun of seeing your drawings come to life in the game is seemingly inexhaustible. The graphics have a charming style and the soundtrack is in the top of it's class on the DS. The personalities of the little fox people, called Raposa, are varied and quite funny at times. It's definitely a worthy game for any DS collection. I highly recommend it.

Mario w/ user-defined sprites

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 29 / 32
Date: October 05, 2007
Author: Amazon User

What you draw simply fills in templates already in the world. You don't draw enough to really set the flavor of the setting, and all the drawing is simply filling in blanks in the background.

It's fun to draw your hero, and the drawing app is great (I sometimes put in the game just to doodle), but the gameplay itself is a disappointingly linear jump and smash, and your works of art do nothing to affect the game world.

SO much fun!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: October 08, 2007
Author: Amazon User

If you are looking for a game thats fun and interactive you have to buy this game!Its like a mario game almost. you can draw your own hero.their are pre made heros if you cant draw one the way you want.the book of life is the main point,you have to find all the pieces to unlock new levels.rescue the towns people,name your town!bring your town from a dark dengy place to the happyest place you'v ever seen!its a good game BUY IT and you won't be sorry!

Fun game with tonsa new innovations

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 12 / 12
Date: October 19, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game, to put it bluntly, is a combination of Mario, Animal Crossing, and a coloring book. This is the coloring book part. It is really fun because you get to draw your own hero and a lot of times in your adventure draw like a cloud to get across a gap. you get to draw with pixel-by-pixel drawing if you want and if you do you can just use a template or make your own which is quite hard in the scope of things. This is wher the Mario part comes in. You have to go in to 4 separate gates which represent 4 different realms. You go through side scrolling adventures which are excruciatingly long. You run, jump and ground pound just like in mario. Fun sidecrolling with boss battles at the end of every realm. This is the animal crossing part. You also can monitor the population of your town. You have to draw certain things like a nice sign for a restaurant and the town crop. Every time you complete a level you will have rescued 3 people, which will get added to your population. Overall this is one AWESOME game. I recommend it to anyone that likes mario and stuff like that.

cool

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: November 03, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game is fun. Only thing is the hero that you draw runs around in 2D. It's an easy to use paint kit with an eraser and different levels of paint brush sizes. Probably for 10 year olds and up, I'm 12. Over all it's a great game.

My Favorite Game Yet !!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: November 04, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I have been an avid game player since my children were small and we adventured thru the worlds of Mario. I was never as good as my boys but I had lots of fun and I still love Mario. But this game is THE BEST because I can create the things that are used in the game. "I" am the creator! And it's not too hard for a "Mom" like me. I just love this game!

Drawn to Life: A game for creative kids

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: November 11, 2007
Author: Amazon User

if you are creative, you have got to love this game. It's a cross between Mario\Animal Crossing type of game. Great for girls and boys. Draw your own hero, weapon, forest, even planet!! Your goal is to defeat the darkness, and this guy named Wilfre. Interact with characters, and literally shape\draw your destiny!!
pros:
DRAW ANYTHING!!
talk to characters
minigames are fun
levels are fun

cons:
levels can be challenging
hard to win minigames
game goes by quick

overall, you should definetly buy your kid this game. They will love it!!
-froglover

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