Good concept but a chore to play
User Rating: 5 | Geuryeora, Touch! Naega Mandeuneun Sesang DS
Drawn to Life is a platform game in which you get to design or colour-in certain items, including your main character. Unless you spend a while and have the skill at making images, you will probably end up with something that looks a bit rubbish, but luckily there are set models for your character including a knight, a robot, a woman, and Santa Claus, which you can then edit. The story is about a town that has been covered in darkness, until The Creator (you) comes back to save the day and sends the hero to do the work. The hero must then go through four portals and complete the set of levels in order to rescue the villages and retrieve pages from the book in order to bring certain items to the town and restore the town to its former glory. In the levels there are 3 villagers to find, and 4 'template' pages. The levels have many branching paths and you will pretty much need to go everywhere to make sure you don't miss anything. Usually games like this have optional secrets, but annoyingly you are required to find the villagers and templates in order to progress. What often happens is you choose the top path thinking it might lead to the template page, only to be blocked by the black clouds. This means this is the exit to that area and you haven't found the required template/villager in that section so must backtrack. Even more frustrating is the fact that the enemies respawn, so you killed them on the way there, you must kill them on the way back, and then when you want to go back to the exit; you must kill them again! The entire game is like this and is a fundamental flaw and it certainly strips the fun right out of the game. You are glad when you complete a level, but then are given the run-around by the mayor. "Go find my daughter Mari" he says, so you run off to find her. "Tell my father to come here" she says, so off you go back, only to have to backtrack again to listen to their conversation together. Then eventually the mayor will give you some excuse to go back to the portal to do another level, and the cycle repeats. In the levels, the platforming is pretty basic and usually just ends up becoming an exhaustive search of spotting the paths and exploring them in turn. To defeat enemies, you can either jump on their heads or shoot your gun. The guns theme depends on the area you are in. In the first world which has a snow theme, you shoot snowballs. In the forest, you shoot exploding acorns, in the water levels, you shoot homing starfish. Using ammunition is usually an optional bonus but seems mandatory in the water levels where fish swim at an unavoidable height and if you run out of ammo, then you probably need to suicide and restart that section. I found the enemies a general annoyance because quite often, the game will make you jump up, but then a flying creature will swoop down and hit you. This happens a lot through the entire game and it is a matter of time before you lose a life due to a series of cheap hits. When you lose a life, you respawn at the start of that section so a small amount of backtracking is required. In general, the camera is zoomed in a bit too much and so becomes fiddly to look around. Your character is usually centred, so in some sections, you will be holding the L or R buttons to shift the camera along. If you want to look up, you stop still and hold up. After completing 4 levels, you move on to the boss battles. I found the boss battles were even more frustrating than the normal game because it is not immediately obvious how to take the boss on, and they all seemed capable of getting cheap attacks on you so were a major drain on your lives. Once you lose all your lives, I thought it would be the case of reloading and trying again, but it seems to auto-save and give you a stock of 3 lives which is frustrating when you throwaway 9 lives on a boss battle. Overall, Drawn To Life had the wonderful idea of being able to draw many of the games objects which adds a lot of charm. However, the annoying game design just ends up being a chore and a major frustration, so you will be glad when it is all over. It would be nice if there was more variety to the levels like having standard left to right levels with more challenging platforming sections in addition to the maze style levels. It would be good if you could either design the enemies or at least have the option to colour them rather than being stuck with the stock enemies.
