Drawn To Life (Nintendo DS) Review

By Mike Mason 22.09.2007

5th Cell were, this time a couple of years ago, a relatively unknown developer with some mobile phone games under their collective belt and a desire to develop for Nintendo DS. Soon thereafter, they began development on Drawn To Life, an original IP on DS, and a while after that THQ picked it up for publishing, as they had with 5th Cell's previous mobile games. Can the team's first DS game stand proud amongst the console's increasingly excellent back-catalogue, or should it pack up its crayons and go home?

We've been looking forward to Drawn To Life since it was first announced, and when we finally managed to get it in our felt tip-covered hands we could hardly contain our excitement. See, Drawn To Life is a platformer with a difference. While it features the signs of a traditional platforming game – lots of jumping, check, collecting-a-plenty, check – it sets itself aside from the norm by allowing players to create their own main character, their own platforms to leap upon, their own vehicles and weaponry to use.

Your role as the player is that of The Creator, a figure of God-like proportions to the tiny little cat/Pokemon/rabbit-like Raposas who inhabit the game. The story goes that you originally created the entire world with a magical tome known as the Book Of Life, watching carefully over the Raposas as they went about their lives. Then, as always, somebody had to come along and muck it all up for everybody else; in this case, an irksome little oik of a Raposa, Wilfre, who decided one day that letting The Creator do the creating wasn't quite enough and wanted to do it himself. Creating a shadowy army and overtaking the land, he also thought it'd be jolly to rip up the Book Of Life itself, stealing the very sun from the sky and plunging the land into darkness. During all of this, The Creator has been a bit of a git and just watched as his loyal subjects abandon their village and become prisoners to a world of shadow. You should be ashamed of yourself. Finally, after much procrastination, The Creator answers the few remaining Raposas' pleas and makes a hero to save them all out of abandoned mannequin – who, appropriately, you have to draw and name before continuing.

Screenshot for Drawn To Life on Nintendo DS

As you might imagine, the creation factor lends itself to replayability as you try out different characters and objects, and also inevitably will probably lead to vulgarities amongst some players. We're above that, of course, and so for the purposes of this review we have been going through the game with our beloved Rodge, a simplistic blue beast with teeth stained the colour of sunshine, a heart of pure gold and stumpy little legs which make him float about a minuscule amount off the ground rather than walk, who you can see above. Don't be fooled by our artistic 'skill' – the drawing tool is robust and detailed enough for you to draw just about who you want to a fair degree of detail. You can put a grid up so that you can create your hero pixel-by-pixel, or you can do it entirely freely; you can zoom in to add extra detail; you can stamp on different things like glasses; you can use patterns, and change colour palettes. It more than gets the job done and allows you to make whatever monstrosities you want, and even provides a handy help function for those who don't know which tools do what. If you're not very good at drawing and don't fancy lurching through the game with something that looks like it was peeled from the bottom of your shoe, you can select a built-in template character to play as. Everybody's covered. While you start off drawing your hero alone, as the game goes on you draw bunches of things, from your character's simple projectile weapon (which changes to match in with the separate worlds' settings) to the stars in the night-sky.

Screenshot for Drawn To Life on Nintendo DS

What of the actual gameplay, though? Well, it's segmented into a couple of parts. First is the overhead map of the village, where storyline segments take place and you help out the inhabitants of the town (named 'Manchester' in our game, to celebrate the best city ever, of course), but the main bulk is in the platforming levels. Your entire goal is to help rebuild the Book Of Life in order to vanquish the world of its terrors and also repopulate the village, and so you must gather up pages and break Raposas loose from cages in each level. It's pretty standard platforming-fare, really, and doesn't do a whole lot different or uniquely - there are moving platforms, platforms that go around like ferris wheels, platforms that you can fall through, etc., straight out of the Book Of The 2D Platformer. The thing is, though, it's quality standard platforming, and with the humble 2D platformer becoming so rare nowadays in comparison to how prevalent it was back in the glory days of the Mega Drive and SNES it's actually refreshing to play something that's so traditional in this way, while adding the extra appeal of playing with a character that you've crafted with your own hands and bouncing around on springs that you have (messily) scribbled. There is a lot of stuff to collect, from coins (spendable in a shop on new patterns, stamps and the like to customise your character) to ability tokens (collect three and a new ability becomes available to buy in the shop), there are big end-of-world bosses, there are the expected sections such as snowboarding/vehicle diversions, and the basic level settings are included (underwater levels, ice levels, forest levels), but it's all so well-put together that it doesn't really matter that the gameplay isn't the most original thing you're ever going to come across. About the only thing that isn't traditional is that you'll also have to tap certain doors and scribble out nasty shadow gunk occasionally to clean up the world (this is about the extent of the touch screen usage, aside the core feature of the drawing itself). It's just good fun, and it's clear that a lot of love has gone into the game. You'll be joyful when, upon coming to world two, your Rodge-equivalent has a new part of anatomy bestowed upon them, to allow you to reach places you never could have otherwise.

You will often come across the word 'charm' in this writer's reviews, and this is probably one of the most appropriate reviews to mention it in. There are bags of it. The characters and overall graphics are twee, cute and well-made, including enemy characters, who will joyfully wander about giving each other piggy-back rides or float around to themselves until they are disrupted by you. The only problem with the visual side is that your creations tend to stand out as not looking as good without a lot of care in drawing them, but it can be looked over. The animation is all brilliant too, no matter how well drawn your creations are, thanks to some clever work on 5th Cell's part. We especially like the 'celebratory dance' when you complete a level and the 'bored dance' when your character is left idle for a little while. There are great little touches, too, such as your character's colour being chipped off as they are injured, until they are in the form of the mannequin from which they were originally created, though you probably won't stay in that state too long with the plentiful supplies of health all over the place.

Screenshot for Drawn To Life on Nintendo DS

The audio is a highlight, too. The music is satisfying, and while it's probably not going to stick in your head in the way that the tunes from, say, Sonic 2 or any number of Nintendo games, do, they are certainly worthy in their own way. The sound effects and voice samples are also clear and well-done, and actually makes Drawn to Life the game that makes us feel guilty for putting the DS into sleep mode – when you close the lid, some poor little Raposas make a disappointed sigh/moan that makes it sound like you've just told them that their birthday isn't happening this year. Conversely, it also makes us happy when you open the system once again, with a childish cheer of pure glee that you're returning to play.

Despite all we have said, Drawn To Life is not without its issues. We would have liked a bit more time to be dedicated to the overhead sections, and used for more than just story-telling with the odd mini-game distraction chucked in. Collecting can get a bit too much in the platforming levels, and frustrating when you cannot find that last little piece of page to allow you to finish. While well-designed, it can also become a bit of a chore to get through platforming stages as they appear overly long for a portable game; it's not ideal to play when you're on a bus, as you cannot even suspend mid-level and pick it up later, as you should really be able to in a game on a portable console with levels that are going on for 10/15 minutes or so. Another potential problem that will put off many people is that of the difficulty level, which is very easy to put it lightly – you're only really going to run into problems if you're liable to running into the paths of creatures with very obvious moving patterns, you're very rarely going to die with the amount of health pickups about, and the game likes to hold your hand and point in very obvious directions in the overhead sections. That said, it must be remembered that Drawn To Life is most certainly aimed primarily at children, which is plain to see by the overall style and tone of the game, and so we imagine it would provide a fair challenge to the audience at which it is targeted. Not every game has to be a challenge of Ikaruga-levels, and it's nice to be able to play something easy-going once in a while; in other words, we would say you shouldn't let the difficulty level put you off, but be forewarned that if you're an experienced gamer you'll sail through it. That's not to say you won't have a good time doing it, though.

Drawn To Life is definitely worthy of your time, whether you buy it or just play on somebody else's cartridge (there are two files on each, and each file allows up to three heroes for you to interchange between as you see fit – we just stuck with good old Rodge). It's fantastic to see your own character chugging along through the game world, and if you know of a child in need of a new game, this is absolutely one of the better ones you could pick out for them. Pick up your stylus, and get scribbling.

Screenshot for Drawn To Life on Nintendo DS

Cubed3 Rating

7/10
Rated 7 out of 10

Very Good - Bronze Award

Rated 7 out of 10

Drawn To Life can keep on colouring as far as we're concerned. While it pushes all the right buttons and is worthy of a playthrough, there isn't enough of a challenge for the older gamer, but for the audience at which it is mainly targeted it is perfect. The drawing mechanic is excellent, and we can't see how it couldn't bring at least a little joy to any gamer who plays it. We hope this is the start of a long relationship between 5th Cell and DS, and can only wish that whatever they do next matches or surpasses this.

Developer

5th Cell

Publisher

THQ

Genre

Adventure

Players

1

C3 Score

Rated $score out of 10  7/10

Reader Score

Rated $score out of 10  10/10 (2 Votes)

European release date Out now   North America release date Out now   Japan release date Out now   Australian release date Out now   

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