Yes, the controls are bad. Everyone's said so. Lots. Accept it and talk about something else.
First, look, OK, yes, the controls are horrible. Everyone has said as such, usually in quite loud, annoying voices, so I'm not just going to churn out another review bad-mouthing them. For the unaware, the game's movement operates by touching the area you want your character, Maxwell, to head towards on the DS screen using the stylus, rather than the D-Pad. Consequently, when trying to carefully and precisely build a bridge over a flame pit or something, if you so much as brush an area of the background Maxwell goes merrily blundering in knocking everything over and proudly leaping into exactly where you didn't want him to go.
In addition, the camera constantly snaps back to look at Maxwell after a few seconds of inactivity like it's being operated by a paedophile, meaning you have to scroll back to that bridge you were building and whilst you're doing that you will almost certainly accidentally touch the background again and Maxwell will be unstoppably bounding towards a river filled with piranhas with an inane smile on his face next time you check on him. So quite a few times whilst playing this I guarantee you will either carve your stylus madly into the unresponsive screen, or just outright turn the DS off and refuse to play any further for a while.
The controls are shocking, but it's been repeated and repeated endlessly by everyone so I'd like to stop talking about it now and move on to other elements. The game's party trick is that you can type in literally any word you want, and that particular object will appear. Mayonnaise, stethoscopes, bottlenose dolphins, Satan; pretty much everything is there, it's damned impressive it must be said. There are over 200 levels to work through, the majority of which have creative and intuitive solutions and can be brilliant fun.
However, it's here my biggest issue with the game arose. With 25,000 or so objects to choose from, you usually find yourself just selecting the same old things every time. I felt a little bad as I was playing it, as the creators had clearly spent so much time designing each and every possible whimsy and fancy you might take, and all I was conjuring were ropes and helicopters in practically every level. It felt as though I wasn't playing the game to its fullest extent, almost like I was cheating.
For instance, when confronted with a poisonous snake that you must kill, the creators probably envisioned creative geniuses spawning, say, a mongoose, or a snake-charmer, or a dead mouse which can be spiked with laxatives, etc, when actually all you do is spawn "Death", then once that's killed the snake, move it to the next enemy and have it kill them too. I ended up killing pretty much every adversary in the same precise way. Maxwell can attack enemies himself, with guns and knives and flamethrowers and things, but, and I'm loathe to return to control issues again, trying to get Maxwell to concentrate on killing what he's supposed to and not just running around in excitable circles is infuriating. It's like your character has ADD.
Another thing - Maxwell doesn't have a health bar. I have no idea whether there's a certain number of hits he can take every level, or whether he naturally heals over time if you leave him, or whatnot. There's no way of telling whether he's about to keel over in a fun, PG-13 cartwheel, still smiling of course, with the next attack he sustains. That's why it's so much easier just to get "Death" to kill everything in the level first before doing anything.
Bless the developers, you can tell they tried hard, they just grossly overestimated the creativity of the gaming public I think. You even unlock special prizes for completing a level three times not repeating any of the words used, obviously trying to coax out some new ideas. But although it's possible to lead the horse back to the stable by riding it and whipping it or attaching a carrot from the end of a stick dangling from its back, it's just so much simpler to tie it to a helicopter and fly it there, the solution applied to pretty much every puzzle there is. At least it would be simple if tying a rope from one thing to the other wasn't like trying to perform a touchscreen vasectomy. No, no, must stop talking about the controls..
Some levels do show glimpses of true brilliance and will have you making small little noises of smug satisfaction and surprise that your idea worked. Having a vampire to kill and about to give it some garlic or holy water, you think to yourself "Hmm.. is this going to work? Is the game going to have thought this through?", and seeing that it does has you look around excitedly for someone to tell. The graphics aren't brilliant, but then again they have to be formatted to cope with every single image IN THE WORLD so I guess that's excusable.
There is quite literally no storyline whatsoever, so once you've completed the last level you're left just looking around and thinking "so is that it then?" I guess you could work back through all the levels again to score more points, but all you can spend them on is different music to be played in the levels, which I found so grating I had to mute it instantly, so that doesn't hold much appeal.
I do, despite its flaws, like Scribblenauts a lot. Any game where you can have two lawyers armed with hairdryers joust on dinosaurs whilst you watch from your God-like position of power goes down well with me. I'd strongly recommend it, because when you're not tearing out liberal chunks of hair and crushing your stylus into the unreactive DS screen, this is a game which will make you smile. Regardless of those controls.
The controls really are f-ing awful though.