The platforming is dull, but the drawing mechanic is what makes Drawn to Life unique and fun to play.
You are cast as the spectator of a village of cute, catlike creatures called raposa. They are a cheerful race, but their village has been plagued with darkness, due to missing pages from the book of life. The book of life is literal, its pages contain necessities in life(sun, moon, rain, ect.). The creator, a godlike figure who the raposa worship, had also abandoned the village, much to their despair. You may not know it yet, but the creator is you. After you speak with the daughter of the village's mayor, the raposa have hope again.
They end up taking you to the library, where you are given the task to put life into a mannequin. This is where you get the first taste of the drawing mechanic. You are given an outline of which you must stay within. This restricts the drawing a little bit, but you can still be creative. You can choose from a default character, or create your own. You can select several different colors and tools from the template on the right hand side of the screen. It can be a little hard to get the exact precision that you might want at times, so it can be a little frustrating.
So at this point you(or really your mannequin) embarks on an epic quest to rid the lands of this darkness. You enter through a gate, which brings you to world one, similar to super mario bros' worlds, and there is a few levels in each world, and they all follow up with a boss fight. In each level, you will have to rescue 3 raposa, and find 4 templates that create a page in the book of life. As you go, the darkness will clear slowly in the village and more of the village will be accessible. The platforming in levels are dull and repetitive, but are by no means bad level designs, just repeated a lot. You will frequently bump into an easel in each level that requires you to draw something to get through the level. For example, it may ask you to draw a cloud to hop onto, and give you an outline to draw it in. But the best part is that you don't actually have to draw a cloud! You can draw anything that would fit in the outline, and it would accept it. For example, you could draw a happy face, or a devil, or a cat, but it doesn't really matter. For each world you go through, you get a different gun(snow world: snowball gun, ect.), and you can always go to the town's creation hall to edit your drawings. For the most part, the game is pretty easy, but there can be some annoying enemies that are hard to take down, and it can be difficult learning boss's strategies and weakpoints. But it still evens out to make it easy, but that really isn't all that bad, considering it is meant for a young and/or casual player. And in my book, an easy game is better than a very hard game.
There really isn't much to say about the graphics. They are nice, clean and crisp. They are very cute and colorful as well, which does a good job of capturing the childish feel of the game.
The sound does that as well, mainly the music. The music maintains a happy upbeat all the time. Boss fights are an exception, with their epic, yet playful music. Sounds effects are quite what you could expect from any game, but nevertheless, they are good.
There are 4 worlds that each have about 5 levels(excluding the last one) that include a boss fight. Saying that, the game can last you 4-6 hours to complete the main quest. That is pretty short, but Drawn to Life encourages more playthroughs because it's fun to make new creations all over again.
With all of that said, Drawn to Life is a great game. When you look past the drab platforming, it is an exciting and unique game. It should not be dismissed by an older gamer, or anyone for that matter. If you want a great DS experience, you should consider picking up Drawn to Life.
Breakdown:
Gameplay ~ 8
Graphics ~ 8
Sound ~ 8
Value ~ 8
Tilt ~ 9
Final Score ~ 8.2