DTL: TNC Wii Gameplay Review

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Hoo… Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter on the Wii. Where do I begin? First of all, let me remind all of you that DTL: TNC Wii was, in fact, NOT made by 5th Cell, the developers of the first and DS version of the game. It was made by Planet Moon, developers of Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Armed and Dangerous, Infected, After Burner: Black Falcon, Smarty Pants, and Battle of the Bands. It’s like an entirely new game, but with the same concept, characters, gameplay style… er… never mind. Let’s just get started.

Controls

The controls for the main gameplay work moderately well. The control stick moves the character, B attacks, A jumps, C is used for doors… and that’s pretty much it there. Control is pretty smooth, and jumping is decent. You can double jump, too. (How do you do that!?) It can easily save your life at times, and is handy for doubling back in mid-jump. You get a special weapon through every world. You get a tail in the first world, which lets you swing from various pegs, though it takes a little while to get used to the timing of aiming your swing. In the second world, you get claws that allow you to climb up certain surfaces. Well… not really climbing as much as simply hopping up the wall. It also adds two chains to your regular attack combo. In the third world you get ice skates and a sword, which is MY favorite since you can slide around at high speeds, slaughtering everything that gets in the way. And finally, the last world gives you a set of wings with controls similar to the first DTL, and a gun. The wings I’m okay with, but the gun, even though it can kill anything in only one hit, you can only fire straightforward. Enemies like Baki are hard to hit. There are also vehicles that you create yourself. This is most easily the best part of the game. Especially the cars. They’re two-wheeled, flip-flopable monster… bike… things… It’s hard to describe. But when you mash the A button, you release a continuous stream of turbos, propelling your car forward at breakneck speeds. Not only this, but the level is created with multiple loops, turns, and ledges in a style somewhat similar to those old Sonic the Hedgehog games. You know, when Sonic used to be GOOD. You can perform a bunch of tricks and flips for fun, and even if it’s by accident and you fall down to the beginning of the track, you don’t complain, it just means more time with the car. There are also helicopters, hot air balloons, and other flying objects, all with that turbo function too, but it’s just simply not as wild and crazy as the car. There are no real control issues, but I wish you could make your hero run faster. Mostly in the village, but I’ll get to that later.

Draw Mode

Draw mode is the highlight of the series. Without this, the concept wouldn’t be original. Let’s see how it is, shall we? Let’s start with the Hero. Hopefully, as you all know, your hero is your creation. You draw the hero from scratch. In draw mode, you use the Wii Remote to draw your object. There’s your first problem. Drawing with the remote is ridiculously hard. Your hand must be completely steady and smooth to make a simple straight line. It tells you to rest your elbow on a surface and draw from there, which helps quite a bit, but I think we can all say that the DS pulled this one off a bit better. Draw mode gives you a couple brushes to work with. The first is the circle brush. It’s just as it sounds like. A circular brush. The thing about this brush is that it adds a bit of a gradient to the edge of the marking to the background, much like the brush from Photoshop. And, like Photoshop, when you try to fill it in with the fill tool, it doesn’t fill in the entire shape because there are a bunch of non-white pixels in the shape. It’s more of a thing used on the finished product for better looks. But the thing is, you want to use it in the beginning because it’s the best-looking brush in the game. The only other one is the square brush. Same thing except without the gradient edges. Much better fill control, but it can make your Hero and objects look a bit too sharp. And, of course, there’s the eraser brush, which is self-explanatory and that I have no problems with. Draw Mode also offers a fill tool, which’ll fill in a closed shape of your choice. Two problems with this one. One: Control with the Wii Remote is terrible, so you’ll often accidentally fill in a line, turning your entire creation that color. Two: THE GAME DOESN’T REGOGNISE IT’S OWN COLORS!!!! I’m serious here; the game will mistake one color for another and fill both colors in. We’re all artists, right? Well, most of us are anyway. We’re all familiar with shading? Good. Let’s say I’ve got a yellow circle. I want to give the illusion that it’s a 3-D object, so I draw a line in a darker shade of yellow arching from one side of the circle to the other, so I can fill in the other side without having to hand-color it. But when I fill it in, the game can’t tell the dark-yellow line from the yellow shape, so it ignores the line I made and fills in the whole shape. Do you get it? Kind of? There’s also various line and shape tools if you can’t draw a straight line, a nice ark, a rectangle, or perfect circle. I try to use these the least often I can, because if you use those, your creation looks really stiff, and you don’t get that fluid feeling you get from a hand-drawn one. And lastly, there are the stamps, which I never used. The stamps are used to imprint a pre-made feature like eyes or shoes. These are obviously made for people who can’t draw. But why, I ask, are these really needed? If someone’s gonna buy a game named “Drawn to Life” you’d think they’d be able to draw! There are templates for pre-made heroes and objects, but again, that kinda defeats the purpose of the unique concept Drawn to Life is. If course, you can add, and recolor the template, but it’s really more fun to see your own unique creation come to life. There’s also a joint function that lets you reposition limbs, which is nice. There are pivot points you can change so that it the limb turns on a certain point, but you’ll often grab the point instead of the box that hold the limb.

Levels

There are four worlds in the game, each with six levels, giving the game a total of 24 levels, plus the final boss stage. You access the worlds through the Raposa Village. The village really disappointed me because it’s 2D. And because your character moves so slow, it takes forever to get from one place to another. Speaking of slowness, DTL: TNC Wii is famous for it’s absurd loading times. It can take up to probably 15 seconds to load. Doesn’t seem like much, but it feels like an eternity. Seriously. Count up to fifteen in full seconds. Right now. I’ll wait.

…

…Done? Good. Doesn’t it take forever? Especially when you aren’t doing anything? However, it’s not quite as bad as a lot of people say it is. The fifteen second load only really happens in between levels, and the beginning of the game. Not quite so bad when you take the hundreds of five-second Draw Mode loading screens into account. Anyways, the difficulty is insulting. It’s simply too easy. Not as easy as the other DTL games, but still easy. If you want a really challenging platformer, try Yoshi’s Island DS. Unlike 5th Cell’s levels, these ones can get pretty long. Though never really interesting, (Excluding Vehicle Levels) but they can last pretty long. At least for a DTL game. Each level has you complete some objective, usually stuff like “Retrieve This Item” or “Find this Raposa”. Sometimes it mixes things up and has you hunt down a number of items or monsters. But it isn’t like the scavenger hunt that was the original DTL. Most often you’ll find whatever you’re looking for right in your path. However, there are side quests you can take from the villagers, such as finding animals, or kitchen ingredients. These require a little bit more exploration. What do they give you? I dunno. I never took them. My guess is that it’s probably some stamp I don’t need.

In-Game Drawing

A new feature in both versions of DTL: TNC is the inclusion of Action Drawing. This is where you can draw directly into a level for use as platforms. In the Wii Version, you’ll often come across an outline of a box in various colors. This is your canvas. You cannot draw anything outside these lines. There are three types of ink used in the different colors of boxes. Blue is normal ink. You can draw in them to create suspended platforms and walls. Red ink produces a physical object, which can be moved and pushed around, depending on its mass. Sometimes there’s a thumbtack on the canvas, and if the object touches it, it’ll stick to it and can be freely rotated with the pin as it’s axis. Green ink is bouncy ink. Draw a line, and virtually anything that touches it will be rebounded in the angle it’s faced. This concept is pretty entertaining and is a good way to provide some variety and puzzle factors in the game. A few problems, though. If you’re drawing in Action Draw, and your cursor goes off-screen, sometimes it’ll wig out, and ruin your platform/object. Also, in the last boss level, you’re forced to punch the boss inside a action draw canvas over a pit of shadow goo. The problem here is that both punch and draw are B. So if your cursor is inside the canvas as you punch, you’ll accidentally make another line, and often cause the one you’re standing on to disappear, sending you into the goo. Or if you’re in the air, and you try to draw a platform, but don’t hit the canvas, you’ll butt-stomp straight into the goo. Every level will have you create a bunch of items you’ll see throughout the level. Useful things, such as smoke, clouds, acorns… leaves… welcome mats… danger signs… giant forks- COME ON! I don’t need this! I don’t need to waste my time drawing a bird you’ll see fly through the sky on that level only! They don’t do anything! Every time I come across a Draw Mode stand, I wonder if I actually need the item it’ll produce. When I press C to view it’s description and it tells me that it’s a background object, there’s no turning back! You are automatically sent to Draw Mode! You only see that object in one level, if not two. It’s completely pointless. You’ll often find yourself simply selecting a template to save time. But that takes the fun out of drawing your own stuff! But I don’t care. It’s a big, heaping waste of time.

Visuals

This isn’t the DS. Everything is in 3D. …Everything but your Hero and Drawings. That’s not fair! I want a 3D character! All the Raposa are 3D, so I just don’t fit in! Whatever. If you can pull of a good Hero, it’ll actually look pretty cool onscreen. However, if you use the joint function to bring the legs up the torso, you’ll look like your floating. The backgrounds aren’t bad for a 3D setting. I’ve certainly seen worse. The Raposa, as I said a few months ago, look too simple. I would’ve loved to see some more detail in them. The game features cinematics, too. Short ones. Comprised of animated paintings. I don’t exactly see the point, but whatever. It’s nice to watch. Hey, it’s not DTL: TNC DS, but it’ll do.

Music

The music is pretty good. Only one thing. IT PLAYS THE SAME SONG EVERY LEVEL! Well, in each world anyway. The songs are good and they fit the mood, but it gets repetitive and boring quite fast. My favorite track would be the Eastern Winds track. But even that gets tiring.

Other

There’s also a multiplayer mode in the game, too. It’s a collection of four sports games. Rapo-Kick, Rapo-Hoops, Rapo-Puck, and Rapo-Net. Three of ‘em are 3 on 3 sports games, similar to Super Mario Strikers. Each one is pretty much the same, but just have different play factors. The other is a 2 on 2. However, all of them get tedious extremely quickly, and if you want to switch modes, you have to exit the game and come back in. There are about 4 loading screens to go through to get to the game, so ya loose interest pretty fast. What else makes a game terrible? BUGS. BUGS AND GLITCHES. There are a few glitches I’ve encountered throughout the game. One is not a glitch, but a trick. I’ve discovered how to fly. All you need to do is mash A and B and your hero will perform countless jump attacks, and will be propelled slowly higher and higher in the air. It takes good timing and patience, though. I’ve only actually encountered one glitch. But it’s a doozy of a glitch, because IT COMPLETELY DESTROYS MY HERO! I can’t recall how it happened, but somewhere through the game, the game messes up the position of my character’s limbs, shifting them everywhere. I check the hero in Draw Mode, and it looks fine. But when I go back, it’s still messed up! I restart the game. Doesn’t work.
I found a way to get by this by shifting the limbs to different positions on Draw Mode so it’ll match up after is shifts in the game, but glitch shouldn’t even be there in the first place!

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Well, there you go. I think I got everything…
Now for mah score.

CONTROLS- 7/10
GAMEPLAY- 5/10
VISUALS- 7/10
SOUND-6/10
OTHER- 4/10
OVERALL- 5/10

…ouch…

So, overall, the game is only a moderate platformer with moderate graphics, moderate controls, and moderate sound. If you’re looking to buy this game, don’t. I don’t recommend it. At LEAST get it when it’s under 20 bucks. …Or if you’re desperate, 30. Just not the 50 dollars it’s asking for. That’s just ridiculous.

Story Review- [link]
DTL: TNC DS Gameplay Review- [link]