Scribblenauts is a game focused on embracing your imagination. You’ve no doubt heard of all the crazy things you can do in Scribblenauts over the last few months, from rescuing cats from trees using a Lunar Lander to watching fights to the death between the Kraken and Cthulu. Imagination makes Scribblenauts succeed as a toy, but abysmal controls and obtuse puzzles prevent it from reaching its full potential as a game.

Any word (well, noun) you write on the touch screen will be summoned into the Scribblenauts world. The possibilities are huge, but not limitless; there is no trademarked material, profanity or anything culturally sensitive for obvious reasons. You might not be able to summon an army of undead Nazis, but you can ride down the street on the back of Pegasus while wearing a tuxedo and shooting polar bears with a mini-gun.

Players can mess around til their heart’s content in the sandbox area on the title screen, but the real meat of the game is in the challenges. The goal of these is to find the “Starite” as quickly as possible using as few objects as possible. Extra merits are awarded for using objects for the first time, or finding a peaceful solution to a puzzle.

The first few puzzle sets will go smoothly, but as the complexity increases the control system becomes a liability. Object interaction is handled by the touch-screen, but for some baffling reason, the main character’s movement is too. This often results in unbridled clumsiness – you might click on a vehicle with the intention of driving it, only to force it over a cliff due to the stupid automated jumping. It’s downright infuriating when you hit the multi-part puzzles, and a control screw up results in failure near the end. Main character control could easily have been assigned to the D-Pad.

Object interactions can be quite random – a soft collision of two solid objects might send one off into the stratosphere or trigger an explosion. Sometimes objects don’t work the way you’d expect or are totally clumsy to use, like jetpacks, which putter out too quickly, fire extinguishers that don’t put out fires or jackhammers which are used like ordinary shovels. A seemingly straightforward puzzle can end up having a bizarre solution due to objects acting unexpectedly or erratically.

The mysteries of Scribblenauts object generation system begin to peel away after a couple of hours. There may be tens of thousands of objects, but they’re all based on a class and tier structure, and differences can often only be aesthetic. Once you work out the best objects to use within the confines of the horrid controls, you’ll tend to stick to them in spite of the game’s attempts to reward being more imaginative. For example, the Lunar Lander is the best vehicle due to perfect hovering and quick movement, boomerangs are the best throwing objects, and the grappling hook is the best object for grabbing anything. The sandbox aspect of the game starts to lose some of its charm – there are only so many ways you can see different things fight and die.

In its imaginative heart Scribblenauts has a lot of charm, and there’s plenty of fun to be had messing around with its object generator, but a clumsy control system may make you scribble this off your shopping list.