Scribblenauts: Unmasked- A DC Comics Adventure First Look

The Scribblenauts games have always been about merging universes and having a lot of freedom while you play. With Scribblenauts: Unmasked, you will still be able to enjoy the wide range of freedom the franchise offers, but now you’ll be limited to one property. Luckily, it’s a fairly major property that should provide many hours of entertainment.

Scribblenauts: Unmasked takes place in the DC Comics universe. Let’s step back a moment. When we say, “DC Comics universe” we mean virtually the entirety of the universe. There are over 2,000 characters, including more than 30 variations of Batman and 130 variants of Green Lantern. You’ll travel to the Batcave, Oa and various other worlds within the DC realm. Essentially, anything you want to do, you can do. The range of freedom is tremendous.

Did we mention that you can create your own versions of the DC characters? In our brief time with the game, “zombie Batman” was typed into the interface and low and behold, a zombie version of Batman appeared. In addition to having access to all of these characters, there’s a mini-wiki in the game that provides a fairly detailed back-story for each character. Never heard of Caveman Batman? Fear not, you can pull up the wiki and find a quick history of the character. There are even hyperlinks within the wiki that allow you to move from one character’s history to the next with relative ease.

Your own imagination is the limit in Unmasked as you complete various tasks ranging from deadly serious to fairly crazy. At one point we had to save Robin, then cheer him up. It was a water-based level, so we summoned Aquaman. He quickly went to town beating up the bad guys in the water, but it wasn’t enough to cheer up Robin. We had to let him know that he was an awesome sidekick before he was finally happy.

Every time you enter an area, even if it’s an area you’ve already been to, the game randomly generates the tasks that you’ll need to complete. This means that every time you change areas, it will be a new experience. There is a main story that you can play through, but there’s so much open sandbox fun to be had, it might take you awhile to complete the story. When we played, we were sidetracked quite often.

As you progress through the story you’ll open new areas. Beating Gotham City may give you access to the Fortress of Solitude. As you play through each level, use your imagination to conjure up various objects to help you complete the task at hand. You can summon almost anything, and add a few adjectives to the beginning of the item to specialize it. For example, instead of summoning a branch to attack an opponent, summon a flaming branch to inflict extra damage.

Various challenges will limit what you can do on certain stages, so you’ll need to be creative. In one area you may not be able to use the letter B, restricting you from summoning different objects. In other instances you may not be able to summon certain characters, or you may only be able to use specific characters. You can also create or edit characters to your liking; make Green Lantern blue or create a new hero from scratch. Anything you create can also be shared online with friends.

Scribblenauts: Unmasked will arrive on the Wii U, 3DS and PC on September 24th. We’ll have a strategic preview and walkthrough tutorials over the next two months, so stay tuned to Prima Games.