It’s been flying on the edge of the radar since it was announced, so you may or may not have heard about Drawn to Life. If you have heard about it, you know exactly why I bought it.
As you can tell from the boxart, you get to draw in your own character, and while that’s kinda neat, it also sucks a little. No matter how nice your drawing is, it will always look like shit in play, and it’s animated quite poorly too. I suppose that’s the price you pay for getting to draw your character though. But hey, the rest is pretty awesome! You get to draw a ton of other things, like platforms and weapons and stuff, and it’s wonderful! Unlike your main character, all the other sprites come out looking great, and I could simply sit there for hours filling in the landscape with custom props, and then bouncing around and reveling in their beauty. In fact, that’s basically what I’ve done with the game so far.
While you get to design a lot of objects from scratch, with the ability to do whatever you want inside a set frame, there are a handful of things you’re provided with an outline for and can only really colour in. Of course, this is still pretty fun. It’s not quite as great as drawing in an imitation Air Tikki where you’re supposed to draw a cloud, it still allows for a good amount of creativity.
The music in Drawn to Life is pretty upbeat and spunky, but nothing really special. I mean, it’s decent, but you could just as well turn off the volume and put on your own tunes in the background. The graphics, the ones that don’t depend on the player’s drawing talent, are pretty nice. Think Rocket Slime with a little more detail. The animation is very crisp, too. Not quite as smooth as you’d see in the more recent Kirby games, but the artist’s effort really shows through.
As I touched on briefly, the gameplay is weaker than I’d like, but it’s not unforgivably bad. The best way to describe it is to say that it plays like a good (but not great) Flash platformer. So kinda janky and amateurish, but still playable. The ability to doodle in most of the environmental objects and a ton of other stuff really makes the game worth playing for me. Did I mention there is plenty of secret crap to collect? Oh yeah, there’s boatfuls. In conclusion, I think it was totally worth my $30. It’s no Mario Bros game, but if I wanted a game where everything was already drawn in, I’d just play something else.
As for a score? I’d say six and a half out of ten interchangable rating doodads.