Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

I think the first word I tried was “TREE.”

I gunned down a ZOMBIE with a MACHINE GUN. I made a CHICKEN, then burned it with my FLAMETHROWER. The chicken turned into food, which I put into an OVEN. I gave myself an AXE and chopped the oven to pieces. A BABY crawled nearby and, well, I chopped it up too.

A MUMMY will chase you, but dropping in a PYRAMID seems to calm it down. I gave my mummy a BLACK CAT to hold. (The mummy will also catch fire from the flamethrower.) You can call forth a BOOK, TOILET PAPER, ICE CUBE, CHAINSAW and LASSO. Some will do things, others will not. You can tilt a FAN on its back and let it propel you into the air. If you write in CLUB, the game wants to know if you meant the weapon or the building. Either will work.

I made an AMOEBA, but it didn’t do anything.

You can ride a flying SPHINX. An OGRE looks different (but acts the same) as a TROLL. If you click on a COFFIN, a ghost comes out. You can pile up several kinds of BONEs, including a SKULL and a SKELETON. If you put them in an open coffin and then click on it again, the coffin launches the contents around the screen. I stuffed an EYEBALL in there as well. You can’t use a LAMPPOST to climb up a cliff, but it hardly matters since you can summon a HELICOPTER.

This was all on the title screen.

After realizing that if I stayed on the title screen I’d never get anywhere, I started a save file. This triggers a painfully tedious tutorial that covers such gaming wonderments as walking and tapping. In, like, eleven different instructional installments. Seems like they could have explained that you write stuff and have to collect stars a little more efficiently.

Near the end of the tutorial, the game lays out what is forbidden: places, shapes, names, concepts, naughty and copyrighted. You’ve probably heard the rumor that the game knows over 22,000 words, but developer 5th Cell recently stated that was crap. The game knows way more.

I tried my son’s name, and the game wanted to substitute CAT SHARK.

The handwriting recognition is flaky, by the way. I believe it expects you to write in lower case letters, so my upper case words never seem to be read properly. Then again, I have exceptionally lousy handwriting. Thankfully, the game offers a soft keyboard.

The first actual levels in Scribblenauts are, predictably, terribly easy. But that’s not the point. The point is how you do it. One of the capper levels in the first zone requires you to collect three flowers: one by a bumblebee, one floating by a piranha, and one way up on a cliff. It took me several tries to collect all three without accidentally smashing one of the flowers or being eaten by the piranha, but my end solution was as follows: use a PISTOL to kill the bee, cast a FISHING ROD to get the piranha out of the water (and then quickly drop it, run away, and shoot it), then fly that HELICOPTER over to the cliff.

Maxwell – the lead character – moves as you tap the screen. The d-pad is only used for camera control. Since you also have to tap on items to pick them up or interact with them, this means then inevitably you’ll mis-tap and Maxwell will run off a cliff instead of picking up the FIRE HOSE. This is going to be frustrating, I think. At least things aren’t that dangerous. Even the piranha couldn’t kill Max in one attack.

I worry that the game will seem too easy and dull by those who solve every level with LADDERs and GUNs.

Scribblenauts strikes me the kind of game that will only be as awesome as you make it. The types who demoed LittleBigPlanet a year ago and shrugged it off with a “Meh, that was pretty lousy platforming” are not going to understand Scribblenauts. But I do wonder if the inexact controls (what a time I had trying to keep ants away from a piece of cake!) will kill it in the long term.