Negative Gamer Review: Your Doodles Are Bugged! (Xbox Live Indie Games)

I am a horrible artist. Give me a set of markers and a piece of paper, and I won’t know what to do with myself. I’m pretty sure the phrase “you couldn’t draw your way out of a paper bag” was created for me personally. It pains me to see all of these recent drawing games that have come out recently, like Crayon Physics, knowing I won’t be good at them. So I set my expectations pretty low when I got my review copy of Your Doodles Are Bugged! from Spyn Doctors.

YDAB! is an Xbox Live Indie Game where you’re tasked with using a pen to help wrangle up doodles brought to life in a magician’s labratory. By using what drawing skills you have, you create steps, ladders, and paths to move the animated doodles to a container of honey in each level. Does my lack of drawing skill make a drawing-centered game nearly insufferable for me? Or can I look past my shoddy artistic talents and find a game with some real depth?

Nearly Insufferable Is A Good Way To Describe It

I’m not sure I’ve played a game on my Xbox I’ve had less fun with. While this sounds like an overly-harsh take on the game itself, I don’t mean it to be. The game has some real charm. The story, for instance, is pretty cool: Doodleus The Master Doodler was a wizard of some sort who could create magical doodles which he sold to people. He was able to make these doodles by getting inspiration from real, living doodles he kept in a glass jar.

One day, Doodleus’ apprentice caused all of them to get out of their jar and ruin the magic doodles he had been working on. All of this story is told from a lone doodle who acts as your narrator. It’s all very kid-friendly and fanciful, but it was a little interesting reading each story bit between levels. I also enjoyed the musical accompaniment; it’s as fanciful and light as the story, and was a joy to listen to.

The look of the game is also well done. The doodles, as to be expected, are simply drawn…things that hop around levels made up of some very nice hand-drawn pictures of things (people, emus, tree branches, etc.). Hell, I even like the idea of the game: each level has an amount of doodles you must lead to a jar of honey (a favorite substance for the doodles, apparently) by drawing ladders and paths around objects for the doodles to traverse.

Therein lies the problem (and why I can’t have fun with this). This game involves you drawing with a control stick, instead of a mouse or stylus. This immediately ruins the core mechanic of the game. Every action seems to take more time than it should. Drawing lines is a painfully slow affair, as it basically cuts your scrolling speed in half, ruining any chance of making snap decisions when they need to be made. When levels start with your doodles throwing themselves off cliffs into the deadly red-colored bottom of the screen, you need speed to help you.

Watching the doodles move can be a pube-twistingly aggravating affair. As can be expected, doodles act differently over pre-drawn lines and ones you draw yourself; they go faster over one, slower over the other. Each level changes which type of line does which, and where it does it, meaning that it’s basically a crap shoot while you watch the doodles parade on. If you wish, you can fast-forward time to speed up the doodles, but most of the time this leads to doodle death, or watching your doodles constantly get caught on an un-erased piece of line you’ve left. Also, the doodles have a rather erratic jump they can perform. Don’t rely on this to solve stages; not all doodles jump the same.

If the game wasn’t overly-challenging enough, each level they add new obstacles. One level makes the amount of ink you have to draw with limited, which keeps it that way for the rest of the game. Another makes red sections appear: if your doodles touch these they die. These also become a regular part of the game after they’re featured. These stupid difficulty gimmicks just make an already detestable-to-play game that much harder to enjoy.

A few other points worth mentioning:

• As I mentioned up there, you can erase your lines, but the erasing tool is so bad that flecks of lines can be left behind to impede your doodles’ progression.
• Expect to take some time with each level if you’re not an expert: after the tutorial levels, it took me roughly 20-30 minutes to beat each tedious stage.

If I played this on a DS or PC, I could give this a much higher score. As it is, I cannot justify this game at all on the Xbox 360. I’m ashamed to admit this, but this is the first game I’ve played for review that I just couldn’t beat. I couldn’t be bothered to finish it, nor do I believe I have the skill necessary to beat it. If I had any artistic talent at all I’d probably not hate it as much. Yes, there are some glaring flaws that any other version might still have. But, It’s kind of pretty to look at, the music is great, and if you really want to try it out, it’s only 80 MS points. So while I did not have had fun with it, you might.

You might like this game if…

…you can stand to draw things better than I can.

Final Score

A drawing game made for the wrong system.

(What does this score mean?)