Scribblenauts is one DS game you should write off.
But once you get past the ridiculously easy opening training levels, this seemingly cute, novel little game shows its ugly underbelly: It's a game that's mildly amusing when at its best and a complete disaster when at it's worst. Thanks to a variety of problems that the developer, Fifth Cell, never bothers to address, it becomes nothing more than an exercise in frustration and repetition.
It begins with the level design itself. While there are a few that are terribly clever and require unique solutions, most of them involve either flying, opening gates, killing monsters, digging holes, or some combination thereof. One particular level was a terribly complex system of gates that I was simply able to fly through without touching a single switch. Another level had an entire sea of enemies for me to get eliminate, but one Kraken wiped them all out. What it does is over-simplify many of the puzzles to the point where they're too just too easy.
You run into the opposite problem when the game doesn't really bother telling you what it wants to complete a puzzle; it only gives you a hint. Now, if that hint was actually useful, then it could be chalked up to logical gameplay. But when the hint has absolutely nothing to do with the solution (i.e. What does giving a sailor a pie have anything to do with actually getting him off a deserted island?), it's just sloppy programming and planning.
This is compounded by the fact that the game no sense of weight whatsoever. To keep it simple, all objects in the world of Scribblenauts have two weights: light and very light, and while this sometimes makes your life easier (Maxwell is actually strong enough to pull a whale across dry land all by himself), it ruins some of the more fun and creative solutions you could come up with. Trying to use a boulder to counterweight a falling sailor on a board simply sends the boulder flying across screen and the sailor falling to his death. The same thing happens with cars, boats, large stone walls, and my great Aunt Martha (the woman was huge).
What truly ruins everything, though, are the unruly controls. Everything in Scribblenauts is controlled using the DS touchscreen, with no option to use the standard controls whatsoever. You touch the screen to interact with objects, move said objects around the screen, attach them together using rope and glue, and to move Maxwell.
As you can imagine, this becomes the world's biggest mess during complicated puzzles. You might be simply trying to pick up a rope, but you need to touch the rope in just the right minuscule spot to grab it. If you accidentally hit open space instead, Maxwell will move that direction which usually means he falls to his death and dies. This means restarting the entire level over again, and some of the levels get very complex and time-consuming. There's nothing worse than having go back to the beginning because the controls are imprecise and insanely finicky.
Overall, I have a tough time recommending this game to anyone. Puzzle lovers with a lot of extra time on their hands will probably get some mild amusement out of it; everyone else will see nothing but frustration. No amount of cute fluff, hype, or novelty can disguise a bad game, and Scribblenauts is no exception.