User Reviews (1 - 11 of 26)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

Drawn to Boredom

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 15, 2008
Author: Amazon User

What "draw" me to this game (no pun intended), was the fact that you could create your own character and other elements in the game. Sounds fun, no?

That is not as fun as it should be, mainly because you are limited to the space, proportions and templates that the game gives you. There's not that much depth in it, and after an hour or two of playing you'll just be doing things just to get them over with.

Gameplay wise is boring, jump here, shoot there, and backtrack if you forgot something. This is the most annoying aspect of the gameplay. In each level you must rescue three "raposas" and collect 4 torn pieces of a template. If you skipped one, you won't be able to move on, but the game doesn't even remotely tells you what section you may or may not have missed. Making backtraging tedious and a constant.

The game difficulty is very easy, but in some stages is easy to die while jumping or flying, mainly because when you jump or "take-off" you won't be able to see the enemies coming right at you making you lose health or die.

Story wise, you play as the creator (you know God), who must help a village to defeat darkness. This is how the game goes:

1-Talk to mayor
2-Talk to some other raposa
3-Talk to mayor
4-Tap on the flame of life
5-Remove darkness from one section
6-Talk to previous raposa
7-Return to talk to the mayor
7.5 You may need to talk to another raposa again
8-Go through a gate and start "playing."

Is really annoying, the characters are dumb, there's really no meat to the story. You never feel bad for them, at a point I saw why the "creator" forgot about them, they' boring, annoying and demanding.

After reaching the "beach area" they say,: oh thank you the beach is great, but we're bored, can you draw some toys for us to enjoy." Hello, the creator doesn't do that you do dumb citizen!

This is the only game I've ever wanted to grab and throw out of the window, smash it with a hammer and burn it. It is that bad.

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.

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.

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."

drawn to life

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 5
Date: November 23, 2007
Author: Amazon User

i like drawing my own characters, but it is really hard to do! make sure you have your stylus.

I liked this game alot.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 4
Date: December 28, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game is very cute in all ways, the characters are dimunitive and you can draw items that you use and your own character. The one negative thing is that the game is very short. I would look forward to playing a sequel.

Cute but Unoriginal.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: January 03, 2008
Author: Amazon User

STORY-

The Raposa, a bunch of fuzzy storybook creatures, are having their world destroyed before their very eyes. A Raposa turned evil named Wilfre is out to turn everything to shadow and take over. Mari, a young girl, begs for help from the Creator, the person who designed everything in their world. The Creator was said to have abandoned the Raposa long ago, but he finally responds to Mari's desperate plea and agrees to design a hero made from a mannequin to save the storybook. It is explained that you must collect pages from the Book of Life to restore the world to its former beauty. Henceforth, you control the hero who must rescue the Raposa from evil.

BATTLE SYSTEM-

This game is a typical sidescroller, and you have only a few simple attacks to get through these levels. Jumping will be your most effective tool throughout the game, and although you get customizable weapons which shoot objects, you will resort to bashing enemies on the head most of the time. There are several bosses scattered throughout the realms that you must defeat to progress. While these fights are varied enough, the normal enemies you will encounter are less than endearing. It can seem almost too easy to kill yourself at first, either by running out of ammo in a tight spot or by getting eaten alive by shadowy bats and fish. Despite the hardships new players may encounter, this game soon turns into a standard action adventure that won't challenge the mind or the fingers.

GAMEPLAY-

Drawn to Life, as the name implies, centers around the `drawing' aspect of the game. There are several times throughout each level where you will have to use your painting skills to get through. In fact, the game basically kicks off by having you design your very own hero to save the world. This may sound appealing at first, but the drawing system is more like MS Paint than Photoshop. You can choose from premade creations, but stubborn artists (like me) may attempt to make their own. This will usually result in an odd-looking thing which doesn't come close to what you had in mind originally. Players hoping to have a fantastic hero like the one on the cover of the box may be sorely disappointed (there are, as a matter of fact, people who design amazingly detailed Samus or Mega Man sprites, but anything that takes for than ten minutes to design is out of the question for me). You can edit your character at any time by tapping on Creation Hall, but any improvements made will most likely be minimal. Your character isn't on the same level as the Raposa sprites running around, making you feel as though you're a kindergartner on finger painting day. The designers seemed to have recognized this, since most of the things you will end up `drawing' throughout the levels are premade templates that can be filled in with the paint bucket tool. Don't get me wrong; if I had drawn a whale it would have been hideous...but it would have been my whale. The Raposa village aside, the levels are fairly generic platforming territory. There's not much to be said here that hasn't been said before. You can use various customizable tools to work your way through the levels, such as wings, a diving suit and the different modifications of your original gun. The customization of these items make the game fun and good for a laugh or two when observing your crudely drawn clouds, gusts of wind or flowers. The object of the game is to collect all the pages of the Book of Life and to bring back the Raposa village. In each level there are four fragments of a page that must be collected to advance. Other things to `collect' include lost Raposa, secrets (which give you new patterns, sounds or abilities) and shadow percentage, which shows how much darkness you've removed from a level. Unfortunately, this game becomes repetitive after a few levels, and a pattern can begin to be seen. Enter a level, collect templates, exit level, fix something and then continue doing this till the end of Drawn to Life. At its heart, Drawn to Life is an average platformer with a few extra tidbits thrown in there to make it enjoyable. I must admit, it's gratifying to see my own hero (dubbed `Mac') jumping, swimming and snowboarding his way through the varied worlds.

VISUALS, CHARACTERS, and CHARM-

The graphics in this game don't exactly fail to impress, but they don't boggle the mind like the cutscenes Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings either. All things considered, Drawn to Life feels like a game that could have been produced on the GBA were it not for the `drawing' aspect of the game. It's entirely possible that this game was simply an excuse to show off the touch screen's capabilities. The colors are often bright and vivid, and the Raposa are adorable little furry creatures. The style of this game seems to appeal more to smaller children who adore cute things. As mentioned before, the character YOU design will most likely not be `cute' by anyone's standard but your own. Most heroes that are drawn from scratch tend to have some messy edges, sloppy coloring and undistinguishable features. The characters of the story are varied, and although you only start out with Mari, Jowee and the mayor in your town, you will gain more and more as you advance through the levels. It's fun to see the different Raposa you've picked up throughout the worlds, since each one has their own unique personality. Despite this, the characters are fairly 2-D in more than one way. Most are quite predictable and some you will rarely talk to at all. To be fair, you grow to love the weird little furballs throughout the course of the story, and although the plot is clichéd, the execution of it is a bit better.

OVERALL-

Drawn to Life is a generally average game with shiny packaging and emphasis on `drawing'. If you were expecting to whip up fantastic creations at a whim, you'll be disappointed with the lopsided creatures you design yourself. A tired, overused story and fairly unoriginal characters don't help this game's plight. All in all, you've got yourself a decent platformer-sidescroller with some creativity and customization thrown into the mix. It's enjoyable, but brings little to the table that hasn't been seen before. Try borrowing from a friend before purchasing.

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.

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.

Creative Fun

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: February 27, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I thought this game was original in it's format and fun. Alittle too easy for adults with gaming experience but that didn't keep me from enjoying it! I think this game would be great for 7- 14 yr. olds!

Review Page: 1 2 3 Next 

Actions