• News
• Games
• Features
• Reviews
• Previews
• Releases
• Archived News

• Comics
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Wallpapers

• Blog
• Forums
• Chatroom
• Staff

  

Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter

THQ have developed a sequel to the DS original title Drawn to Life, where once again the gamers can not only play through the game's levels but also take charge of how they look. This process starts literally with the drawing of your character, who can be drawn from scratch or taken from a library of templates and edited to your desire. Painting, colouring in, and watching your design come to life is a joy, and there are certainly plenty of laughs to be had here. I took a scary looking fly-human character template and was able to simply swap around the limbs so the poor fellow was walking around on his head, with arms for legs and vice versa.

With your character designed, you can then set off with him or her across the game's platforming world wherein you draw and design the platforms, scenery, objects, and weapons all yourself. This all sounded a little bit Little Big Planet to me, and something I put to the developers, who said that this was a lot simpler to control and design. Here, the levels are mostly structured for you, and it is the look and finishing touches to the world you create. This means you can get straight down to playing what is a fun platforming title, which is then regularly injected with brilliance as you are tasked with drawing the right size platforms for the job, but also taking time to make them the exact polka dot colours you desire.

Jump around classic 2D platforming style levels ...

Editing in-game objects is done both in a window that comes up and on-the-fly. What is pleasureable is the level of editing available, for example the style of bees, leaves, or flowers you'd like to see around the world. Come up to a box surrounded by a dotted line in the game world and you know something is missing. This then brings up a basic picture editor so you can design the exact style of object you want. The game then remembers this design, and replicates it around the game world as you play. Running along and seeing a flower pop up you designed a level before really makes the game feel indivdual to you. Watching a swarm of bees cloned from the design you drew buzzing animatedly around a hive, or the leaves you drew blowing in the wind, is a great touch.

As you progress the game allows you to draw yourself extra abilities, like wings which allow you to triple jump and glide to previously inacessible areas. As stated before, while painting can be performed in an editor window, you are also sometimes tasked with designing objects in-game. For example, I came up against an impossible boss, sitting at the foot of a slope. You can't defeat it yourself, but there's a drawing box at the top of the slope. Scribble a huge rock shape, watch it turn solid, roll down the hill and crush your foe - genius.

The version I played was an alpha build, but the main design of the game was there and looking very cute, the crisp 2D hand-drawn style graphics a joy to behold. Hilariously for some reason when you get hurt, your clothes start falling off until you're a naked little man/woman/skeleton/fly/whatever you've drawn as your character.

Customise your character fully!

The title is set for release around Christmas this year and was a lot of fun to play. The game itself is a charming platformer, made very addictive by seeing exactly what you would be asked to draw next, expanding your character's abilities and generally designing your own game world.

Look for more on Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter next week at E3, and as the game nears release later this year!

Comments

Hellfire Says:
May 29th, 2009 at 14:51 || Total Comments: 994

The first Drawn to Life came before LBP so... :P I really really like 5th Cell games, finished Lock's Quest the other day and liked it, so I'm looking forward to it!

We are sorry but comments are temporarily disabled.
Please visit our N-Europe News Forum to discuss this article.