It turns out Maxwell is collecting starites to reverse a curse that is turning his sister to stone. The inconsistent payoff takes away from the motivation to go out of your way to come up with something witty, making many puzzles feel like you're simply going through the motions writing in the obvious word on command.Ī basic story ties the whole game together, which is a first for the series. In the aforementioned zombie puzzle, players are asked for parts to assemble a robot, but the same generic robot is built regardless of whether you decide to build it out of a tank, unicycle or even a giant tortoise. It is also the source of many disappointments, as the game does not always acknowledge your creative solutions. This can lead to hilarious results, like watching a farmer ride around on a giant ear of corn when asked to create something from their home. Puzzles typically boil down to basic word association, with so many possible solutions that nearly anything remotely related to the obvious answer will work. The trouble is that none of the puzzles are particularly challenging.
It's really just a bunch of smaller puzzles grouped together, but having a series of puzzles that actually build on one another makes them more satisfying to complete.
Or a hunter might need help trapping a dinosaur, which involves multiple steps as you construct the trap, set the bait and try to sedate a rampaging allosaurus. For example, one puzzle might ask you to prepare for a zombie invasion by writing in a series of parts to build a defense robot.
Then there are more the elaborate puzzles, which reward a full starite. These smaller puzzles only offer a starite shard, eight of which make a full starite, as a reward but also make up the bulk of Scribblenauts Unlimited's goals. For example a boy might tell you he is frightened of a bully, which could be solved by giving him a means of defending himself or by simply adding an adjective, like "friendly" to the bully or "brave" to the boy. The side tasks are smaller puzzles, usually only requiring a single well-placed word. One level could encompass a whole city, with characters walking around and side tasks to complete in addition to the main level goals. What has changed is the scale, as levels are much larger with a greater variety of goals. The core formula remains mostly unchanged from past Scribblenauts games. Solving puzzles rewards players with starites, which gradually unlock new levels on the world map. Players can write in practically any word they can imagine to solve puzzles, including adjectives to expand the game's already robust vocabulary. Scribblenauts Unlimited, on the other hand, comes much closer to fitting the literal definition of a sandbox. After all, an actual sandbox is really more of a blank slate for people to mould rather than open cities to drive through. The term sandbox has been applied to open-world games in the past, but perhaps that term has been used incorrectly all of this time.
Release Date: November 18 (North America), Early 2013 (Europe)