Unfortunately, not all of the game's drawing aspects are nearly as free-form. In a number of cases, you'll encounter objects and devices that come with preset outlines. You need a surfboard to get across a body of water, or a rocket ship to dive into a random shooter level (more on that in a moment), and consequently you're given an outline of a surfboard and of a rocket ship. All you really get to do is color them in as you please. Although there's nothing wrong with getting your coloring book on, it certainly would have been more fun to design your own rocket or replace the surfboard with any number of inappropriate-for-the-situation objects.
Though drawing is a big component in Drawn to Life, you spend a great deal more time jumping around a bunch of modestly designed 2D levels, as well as wandering around the raposas' village. Sadly, neither of these parts of the game is exactly captivating. In the main game, gameplay consists almost exclusively of generic platforming levels. The level designs aren't bad or anything, but they're extremely repetitive. You'll find yourself exploring over and over again what feels like the same nooks and crannies for the same items and the same captured raposas required to exit the level. Enemies are extremely simple and require little more than a few bops on the head to dispatch. You have a gun that changes with each world, but save for a few high-up enemies that are difficult to hop on, the guns aren't very useful. Every now and then the game changes things up by morphing into a scrolling shooter for a short bit, or having you draw wings on yourself to tackle a few stages, but these aren't necessarily significant improvements to the game design. Again, it's not that the platforming stuff is bad. It's just so simple that it's hard to imagine anyone experienced with the platformer genre getting too excited about it.
When you aren't hopping or drawing, you're hanging out in the raposas' village, fetching things for people and having a lot of conversations. The village is essentially the hub area for the game. Although the conversations you'll have with the various raposas are interesting enough and written fairly well, it just isn't much fun to have to constantly run back and forth for the sake of talking to one guy, just to be sent to talk to another guy, and then engage another cutscene that forces you to run all the way back across the village. The game clocks in at around 9 or 10 hours, but you have to envision that it'd probably be closer to six or seven without all these fetch-quest sections.
Drawn to Life is ultimately best served for players who haven't spent their lives playing the variety of different platformers this game borrows from. Its drawing mechanic is something anyone can appreciate, but the gameplay itself is so simplistic that older audiences may get bored with it after an hour or two. Still, it's easily charming enough to win over younger kids and casual players, and it's an innovative and unique piece of work that's certainly worth at least a cautious look by any DS owner.
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Drawn to Life (DS):
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