When Crayola Colorful Journey showed up for me to review, I didn't have very high hopes. A game marketed to kids "5 and up" is usually lacking in the quality, entertainment, and challenge areas, and so I was a little disheartened. The concept as promoted on the box was a world where you could create your own solutions to puzzles, creating a bit of curiosity in my mind. A puzzle platformer? By Crayola? Surely it couldn't be worthwhile in comparison to Braid or Prince of Persia, but maybe, just maybe, it had a few redeeming qualities for its target demographic. Read on for the full review, and find out how you can win our review copy!

[Update: The contest is over, thanks to everyone who entered, and congrats to our winner, PSQUARED2! ]

Story & Background
The Story begins with your character, stereotypical boy or stereotypical girl, walking through the forest. You quickly learn that someone has been stealing colors, turning colorful trees and rocks into mere paper-looking representations of themselves. To help figure out this mystery you'll have to traverse multiple worlds, coloring in the black & white objects along the way. But what will you do when you get to a wall that's too high to climb? You'll use your Crayola crayons to draw a way up!

After making your way through the forest, you'll learn a little more about what has happened, and will begin your journey through three other worlds. The exact solutions will be up to you, but you'll get a little help depending on what difficulty level you have set.

Gameplay
Although it's impossible to tell from the box or artwork for the game, Crayola Colorful Journey is actually very similar to a Lemmings game, except in this case you just have one "Lemming," your main character. You must guide your character through the level, overcoming obstacles and avoiding death, all with the use of various Crayola crayons.

Each color draws objects with different properties, creating a multitude of solutions. The red crayon creates objects that stay wherever you draw them, and can be walked on even at slight angles. The blue crayon creates objects have traction like red objects, but the objects fall and can be piled up on the surroundings. Yellow objects float in water due to their density, and green objects stay where their drawn, but don't have enough traction to be climbed, making them good for slides.

Playing the game on the Easy difficulty level won't take more than an hour or so for any regular Wii gamer, but children may have more trouble drawing the bridges and ramps that require a steady hand. On the Intermediate and Hard difficulty levels, the character doesn't stop to wait for you to draw anything, so you have to be very quick at blocking them off. Even older kids will have trouble on the Hardest setting, as the main character seems to run towards death without the slightest sense of self-preservation.

One problem with the advanced levels of difficulty is that there are no advanced controls. It would be nice if there was a way to make the d-pad change your crayon color, or use the plus (+) and minus (-) buttons to control the zoom level, but sadly these buttons go completely unused.

Graphics & Sound
Budget titles aimed at children have notoriously bad reputations for having mediocre graphics and sound, but Crayola Colorful Journey had much better graphics than I was expecting. The worlds are very colorful, and there is a lot more happening in them than just what your character controls. The cutscenes between worlds look like colorful coloring book pages, but there is a small problem, at least in my opinion.

There are absolutely no voice overs in this game, even though it is aimed at children that may not be able to read. You can claim that the game helps teach reading by only showing the story, but for kids that might be very young, it would be much more entertaining to have the story read to them. Parents or older siblings will probably be around when they're playing, but a nice voice over could have made the game more than just a simple adventure title.

Conclusion
At $29.99, Crayola Colorful Journey is still a budget title, so the lack of multiplayer or other advanced features is understandable, but the game may be a little short for even the easily entertained. The multiple difficulty levels give it some replayability, but most children are likely to be frustrated by the suicidal tendencies of Fillup, Violet, and their dog Spot. If nothing else, the concepts in Crayola Colorful Journey are good for kids to learn before taking on bigger challenges like Lemmings.

Contest!
Now you're chance to win our copy of Crayola Colorful Journey, all you have to do is leave a comment telling us your favorite crayon color, and why. Have fun, and we'll draw (no pun intended) a winner in one week!

Limit one entry per person. All entries must be submitted by Tuesday, May 12, 2009, at 5PM Central Standard Time.