One of the most talked about games of the DS's library for sure, but, whilst it fails to be the seminal title of the console's collection, there's just enough pleasure to warrant your purchase for this one.
Firstly, the positives. With 20,000 words to choose from, the game sure does come close to what it promises, being able to write anything and therefore draw anything, in order to succeed. The mission: get Maxwell to the starite to complete the levels, and use whatever objects (minus profanity, trademarked items and booze) you wish to achieve this.
The game ultimately offers it's best entertainment through the 'puzzle stages' of the game. In these, Maxwell will get the starite if he fulfils certain ambitions of the level: One example being, how to get a Cat who is stuck on the roof to reunite with her owner. Of course, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to think about how this could be done, so type in 'Ladder' and you can tell Maxwell to climb up the ladder, pick up the cat, and take her to her owner, well done, you've got yourself a starite. But for the extra challenge, the game offers advance mode, whereby you can play the level you just completed, but 3 more times, and you cannot use the same item you have used before. Simply put, this mechanism is brilliant, and it's fantastic fun to think of numerous ways to get a cat off a roof, and the same goes for the rest of the 100 or so levels on the game. I'd give the game 5 stars based on this premise alone.
And yet the 'Action' levels almost ruin everything, and you have to play them in order to get enough virtual currency so you can unlock later levels. In these, you have to control Maxwell from point A to where ever the starite is, without getting killed, being creative to get the highest score possible. These levels aren't fun, as the game does not recognise creativity in the sense of the puzzle games. Troublesome shark in the water? I tried to poison it, give it food to distract it so I could swim by, cage it, whatever, it didn't work. All I could do was kill it. And there are dozens of examples of this throughout these action levels, whereby the only way to get the starite is to kill something, use a rope on something, or fly using something. It's repetitive and boring.
The game loses a further star with the appalling controls. Everybody is right to make an issue about them, and I won't repeat what others have said, but I'd far rather 5th Cell would have spent a few more months incorporating D-Pad controls for Maxwell, then researching and incorporating some of the words which are trivial to the extreme.
You should however, get this game for the wonderful puzzle levels, and the ability to download other people's puzzle levels... Yet I can't help but feel without the action levels and tighter controls this could have been one of the most important games in history.