Scribblenauts Unmasked: A DC Comics Adventure

Scribblenauts Unmasked: A DC Comics Adventure is basically the ultimate nerd fantasy come to life for a DC fan, mashing up the creative sandbox of Scribblenauts with the entire freakin' DC Universe. You step into the shoes of Maxwell, a kid with a magic notebook that can make literally anything you type appear, and this time around, he and his sister Lily get zapped into Gotham City. Their travel globe breaks, scattering these things called starites everywhere and so begins a massive scavenger hunt across iconic DC locations. You'll team up with Batman, hang out in the Batcave and eventually get the whole Justice League involved to stop a doppelgänger of Maxwell and the big bad Brainiac from messing up the multiverse. The plot is cute and all but it's pretty basic and clearly designed for a younger crowd, so don't go in expecting anything deep.

The real meat is, of course, the gameplay, 'cuz it's classic Scribblenauts. You solve puzzles by typing up objects, animals or characters to help out NPCs and you can slap adjectives on things to change their properties. Need to put out a fire? Spawn a fire extinguisher or just make the building fireproof. The genius is in the freedom and Unmasked takes that to the extreme by packing over 2000 DC characters and items into its database. It's insane. You can summon any version of Superman, call in the entire Green Lantern Corps or even bring out some hero so obscure that only the biggest comic nerds would recognize them. This is a massive highlight and a total playground for anyone who loves DC lore.

The game also introduces a reputation system, where you earn points for completing missions to unlock new stages, costumes and origin stories for heroes like Batman and The Flash. The costume system is cool 'cuz putting on a Flash suit makes you run super fast and a Superman outfit gives you laser vision and flight. Plus, there's a hero creator that lets you mix and match parts from different heroes to make your own OC, which is a fun sandbox feature on its own.

But here's where the game starts to show its cracks, while the puzzle solving is as creative as ever, the mission structure is a huge step down from the previous game. Instead of having a bunch of well designed handcrafted levels, Unmasked relies heavily on procedurally generated random side missions that you have to grind over and over to earn enough reputation points to progress. This gets pretty repetitive quick because you'll constantly see the same fetch quests or rescue missions pop up, making the whole experience feel like a chore. The main story levels are way too short and the cool origin stories for the heroes are few and far between, leaving you with a ton of repetitive busywork.

On top of that, the game penalizes you for using the same word twice in a zone, which is a cool idea to encourage creativity but just ends up being annoying when you need to spawn a common item. The game can also be buggy with missions sometimes autofailing due to random NPC fights. Because of this random mission system, a lot of the cool DC characters you can spawn end up being totally redundant, just standing around when you could have solved the puzzle way faster with a simple gun or jetpack. It honestly feels like they spent all their time and budget on getting the DC license and filling the database, but forgot to build a fun game around it.