Drawn To Life: The Next Chapter Review [Wii]

It's a great concept that a game should allow you to create your own hero and parts of your own environment. Combine this with a platformer mechanic, the Wii and you should have a game which is fun, if not anything else.

Drawn To Life: The Next Chapter gives you those options and, as the Creator, it's your job to fill the world with your take on things such as flowers, logs, balls, cars and anything else that needs creating.  This is a simple platformer game, and your character (which you also draw) has to negotiate the levels.

So the Wii version of the game is fun enough initially. It was great to draw genitalia for flowers, a massive black sun and a moon that looked more like a Tellytubby than anything else, even though I was going for an Ozzy Osbourne look.

But that's half the problem, or most of, with this game. The drawing mechanic. It would seem to be simple to draw using a Wiimote, but actually, it's more of a pain than first anticipated, and becomes tedious pretty quickly. There are presets from you to choose from, but I found them too clean, and too pretty to use.  

Let me just take a moment to explain why this drawing mechanic is so important, and probably more so than the story or the platformer game it's embedded in.

The game depends on you, the Creator, to make up pieces of the world and environment which are missing. You get to an easel as you pass through the game world, and you have to draw objects in order to proceed through the level. Early on you have to draw a log, and those logs magically appear in the world (surrounded by your genital flowers) allowing you to progress. I did start trying to make a log (a toilet kind), but got so frustrated with the drawing that I just ended up with a few squiggles  which suggested a three-year-old was the Creator. A selection of choice lines with a massive hole in the middle didn't stop my hero from miraculously floating over this potential hazard, and I was disappointed.

Now, apply this to the whole game, and you'll find that you're not actually adding anything to the game world. If anything, being the Creator seems to mean that you invariably destroy what would otherwise be a charming world.

While some objects can be drawn in the actual game (Action Drawing), most of the times you have to stop the flow of the game in order to draw an object at the aforementioned easel. What's annoying about this is the loading screens, and you find yourself having to wait to get into the drawing section of the game (only to squiggle or use a pre-made item) which really does effect the flow of the game. Platformers are fast and fun, and this addition only slows you down. Combined with the boring story line, it does nothing to enhance the gameplay.