Super Scribblenauts

It takes a couple of tries, but after creating a harmless hunter and a paper lioness in order to trick a lion into a magician's secret room, I get what Super Scribblenauts aims to bring out in its players. It wants me to create the most bizarre combinations of adjectives and nouns as possible. The option to bend the regular nouns into new and weird creations through the use of adjectives is after all the biggest new feature of Super Scribblenauts compared to the original.

By the time I've gone through the 120 puzzles in Super Scribblenauts I've created countless metal fish, vampire babies and poor millionaires. I guide Maxwell with a steady hand through the levels and feel happy with my creations. And while most puzzles can be solved by using the first and most obvious thing that pops into my head, the real challenge is to figure out alternative solutions. And if you're completely lost, you can always unlock a hint or two.

No matter how fun it is to for example give a guy some extra confidence (with a machine gun, a bravery potion and a police officer), it's when you take a step out into the sandbox mode that Super Scribblenauts really shows its potential. I never get tired of pitting a furry kraken against a giant evil superhero and see which of them wins. Or if an angry wolf would fall asleep after eating sleeping pills slipped into a juicy steak. Or if a vampire butterfly actually can suck blood from an elephant. Your imagination is the only limit to the sick ideas that you can manifest in the game.

One thing that I never liked in the original Scribblenauts was the controls, where controlling Maxwell was a chore. 5th Cell have listened to the critics, thank goodness, and you can now control Maxwell by using the D-pad which gives a much smoother experience. Super Scribblenauts has also been given better physics, so mountains won't behave like balls of cotton, and the game's collision detection isn't as crazy these day. The graphics have pretty much gone untouched though, but they are still as cute as ever in their simplicity.

Super Scribblenauts is what Scribblenauts should have been when it was released last year. Sure, there's the new adjectives and a new control scheme, but they don't feel as if they are updates that would normally warrant a sequel. Still, 5th Cell gets away with it this time since Super Scribblenauts is one of the best hand-held titles this year.