Doodle God

DLC Review from Matt - Monday, 28 June 2010 @ 11:45am

Doodle God isn’t really “doodle” at all. The Doodle name to me implies that the art style is simplistic line art. Doodle God isn’t particularly liney, and while slightly hand-drawn they’re not nearly amateurish enough to really claim the “doodle” name like something like Doodle Jump.

Godhood is also dubious. Your powers are limited to combining elements to form new elements, then combining those, and so on, until you’ve discovered all the elements.

Fire plus Stone. Makes sense, really.

The elements in question aren’t really elements in any sense of the word. Boron, Helium, Uranium, these are true elements. There are probably others. I forget. Anyway, though you start with the ancient Classical Elements – Earth, Air, Fire, Water. These are not only the first elements, but also the first categories. But even this is quickly abandoned as you mix things, and later in the game you’re creating elements like “Zombie” and “Book”. Element becomes nothing more than a generic term for “thing”.

The game is played quite simply. You tap a category of elements, which slides open on one side, then a second which slides open the other side. From those categories you tap two elements. If they don’t match they wiggle and go away. If they do match a new (or sometimes repeated, “fire” with a lot of things makes “ash”) element is formed, and now you have a new possibility to create further elements.

Creating a new element gives a screen showing it, with a relevant quote, and though some of these are fairly meaningless or contrived, a few of them are genuinely funny.

There are quotes like this on all of 115 elements, sometimes more than one

Humour is a strong theme through the game, right from the beginning intro “video”. Some of the connections made are amusing. I laughed when Dinosaur plus Human made me Dinosaur and Blood. Oil’s quote is from BP – Bringing Oil to American Shores. A rather topical bit of black humour.

Some new elements open minimal or no new directions, while others, such as “life” explode with new creations. The way things connect isn’t always intuitive, but usually makes sense in retrospect. Life plus Rock makes Egg. Egg plus Sand makes a turtle. Life plus Sand makes seeds. It’s a conceptual connection, not a scientific one, obviously.

So while science is told to go jump, and that’s fine, it’s actually mathematics that bring Doodle God down. Every element created is a new possibility, a new potential match. It doesn’t take long before these elements, unhelped by unintuitive connections, start to become unfeasibly difficult to find. Exponential growth means that by the last element there are almost 13,000 possible combinations.

I created sex! You're welcome!

To help you out there is a hint button. The light bulb item at the bottom glows when available, and if pressed will open up two categories that have members which can join for a new element. This button can only be pressed every three minutes, though, and starts a timer when pressed. Late in the game, though, this becomes almost the only practical option to find new elements, so much of the late game is spent randomly pressing things together while waiting for the hint to light up again.

It’s a pity that it devolves down to that, and there’s still a lot of fun to be had, even late in the game. But as the elements increase the fun gets diluted down. There’s no replay value to Doodle God, but I’m optimistic about future updates and the possibility of new things being added and upgraded, and the end game text suggests future updates will include mixing THREE elements together, massively increasing the possibilities.

Some categories for you to find stuff in

Pros

Slick presentation, humour, addictive gameplay, everything you could possibly expect for $1.19.

Cons

Zero replayability, dubious long term value, exponential growth makes late gameplay slow and clumsy.