Nintendo Okie

Nintendo launched the eShop back in June, but surprisingly didn’t have a lot of first party content available at the time. The months went by and still Nintendo had no original 3D games available for download. It wasn’t until now with the release of Freakyforms: Your Creations Alive! that they’ve finally gotten their first, original 3DS downloadable game on the system. It seems like an odd choice, but it also seems like Nintendo is taking the time to experiment a little in the downloadable space. Is it a gamble that’s going to pay off?

What You Need to Know

Freakyforms is not what I’d classify as a game. Rather it’s more of a design tool with a little game built in to it. You build creatures, called Formees, out of various shapes that you can manipulate in a number of different way. These creatures can be as simple, or as complex as your imagination will allow. You then use those creations to explore a world to collect coins and unlock more materials to build new creatures with. All of your creatures can be edited at will, or shared with friends through the use of QR codes.

Your Imagination is Your Only Limit

If Dr. Frankenstein had owned a 3DS perhaps his monster wouldn’t have turned out quite so badly. He could have planned things out before building his final design. The whole basis of Freakyforms is to create, bizarre, weird, or even life-like creatures. Through the use of the touchscreen you can add, color, reshape and resize a number of pre-set body parts. These will come in a number of different categories with dozens of shapes for each part. You can choose regular square or circle bodies, or you can go more unusual and choose bodies shaped like crowns, or doughnuts. Arms and feet come with so many different shapes and sizes it would make a Foot Locker employee jealous. You can even add things like hats, glasses and purses to your creatures. Each of these shapes can be combined in thousands of different combinations and can be placed anywhere on your creature. These combinations can lead to some very complex formees. I thought I was creative by building a tank that was shaped like a T-34 only to see some formees come out of Japan that looked like Gundams, Link, or a hamburger.

You’ll begin the game with a small number of shapes that you can choose from and as you explore the world in the tutorial levels you’ll earn a few more shapes to allow you to build more complex models. Once you’ve finished the tutorials areas the world begins to open up and you’ll encounter more environments inhabited by more creatures that will give you access to more shapes to build even more complex creatures. It’s this carrot on a stick approach to the game that will keep you coming back for more. You’re always wondering what new shapes you’ll get that will allow you more creative ideas. I’m quite proud of the Sgt. Keroro that I created.

Share with Your Friends

There was a game released a few weeks ago called Pyramids that I raved about their use of QR codes and then I wrote an article on the site about how I wanted to see more QR codes used for sharing content. Well, Nintendo must have been reading because they’ve given you the ability to share your creations through the use of QR Codes. After about an hour with the game you unlock the ability to share and read QR codes that you can save to your SD card and upload to your computer. Then you can post them online, email or fax them to friends if your prefer. They can then save those formees to their system and edit them, or just use them in their game. It’s a great way to collaborate on a creation. There are already a lot of custom made creations online that you can add to your game.

You can also take your creatures and pose them in pictures using the AR cards included with the 3DS. You can create scenes in the real world, using some of the assets in the game. It’s neat to try and find ways to use these characters in real world situations, but ultimately it’s not something you’re going to use very often.

There’s Not Really a Lot of Game Here

The creation tools are very robust and have a lot of content to explore. The game that you use your formees in, however, isn’t as much fun. There are a number of different environments to explore, but they’re all very limited in size and things to do. You’ll run into formees who will give you missions, like breaking a certain number of blocks, creating a specific type of egg or carry them from one part of the level to the next. The tasks are very easy to complete and don’t really require doing anything you wouldn’t normally do in the level. Outside of that there’s not really a whole lot that you’ll be doing. Exploring the world doesn’t unlock new areas. Those are unlocked by exploring the worlds you’ve already opened and building new formees.

Not So Hot Controls

Where the actual portion of creating your formees in Freakyforms is great and works really well, the actual controlling of the character in the platforming sections don’t. Everything in the game is done using the touch screen. To move your character left or right you touch the corresponding side of the touchscreen. To get your formee to jump you touch a large blue circle in the center of the screen, pull it down and release. You can also use this circle to bash blocks and collect items by moving your formees’ body around.

The problem is that none of it works really well. The characters move very slowly. Many times, depending on the number of legs or the size of your creature it will get hung up on terrain pieces and can’t climb hills very well. Jumping is a bit random as you can get your character to go in more or less the right direction, but if you’re looking for any kind of precision it’s just not there. Flying, or swimming are about the only things that really work like they’re supposed to and I found myself creating an abundance of creatures with wings so that I could fly everywhere I wanted to go.

Nintendo has created so many great platformers over the years with responsive controls that have the character go exactly where you want them to. In order to accommodate all of the different types of creatures I think the platforming portions of the game suffer.

Conclusion

There are really two different parts to formees that have very different experiences. If you’re just interested in building interesting creatures that you then share with other people, or you use to create pictures then you’re going to have a lot of fun. The creation tools are easy to use and there is a lot to them. However, the game portion of the title leaves something to be desired. Early on I was very interested in exploring the world to get new pieces to use in the creation, but after a while it became more of a chore to explore the areas and the magic seemed to wear off. It’s nice to see Nintendo experimenting with something new, but this one falls just a little bit flat.

Final Score: 

Review copy of the game purchased from the Nintendo 3DS eShop.
Created more than two dozen formees and explored three different environments.
Total Play time: 5 hours