Comic Workshop 2: Who wants to be a pro? (3DS app review)

Title: Comic Workshop 2
Developer: Collavier Corporation
Publisher: Collavier
Release date: 18 June 2015
Price:$9.99/£7.19/7.19€

Mixed feelings, that’s the best way to describe Comic Workshop 2. For those of you who already have the first game, is the sequel that different? No, not really. But it is better and you will get a nice 40% discount.

A peek at some of the options this app has to offer

Repeating the tutorials over and over made me think of something…

Comic Workshop 2 has one big pro and one huge con. The pro is the dazzling amount of options. Anything you can think of has an option. All options are well thought-out and work perfectly. This is probably the most complete drawing app available for the 3DS family. Less amazing are the tutorials. An app with this many options needs a proper tutorial. Well, there are tutorials. An overwhelming 29 of them! Mind you, this is not art academy, these tutorials are not drawing tutorials, they just explain all functions. The English in the tutorials is horrible or at the very least quite sloppy. Easily avoided mistakes are, sadly, quite abundant. Just a little example: “The last one if used to manage your layers.” Now this might sound like nit-picking but it can be confusing at times. On the bright side, the enthusiastic use of Google-translate quality English can also make you giggle. But that’s not all I have to say about those tutorials. Did you miss a step because you tapped too soon? Well that’s too bad, these tutorials do not have a step back option. You’ll have to listen to the whole thing all over again. What’s worse, because of all the options you can’t get started without any tutorials, you actually need them!

Now that we’ve addressed the big stuff, let’s dive in deeper. What is the most important thing about a drawing app? The drawing itself of course and I absolutely love it. Drawing feels very natural, almost like drawing on paper. There are a lot of colour options too. In fact, with your colour palette you can make any colour! The only con for drawing would be the fact a page is split in at least 2 boxes. While this is natural for comic drawing, it makes it harder to design a great title page. The available effects looks stunning, especially considering it’s just a 3DS app and not a complete professional drawing program. There is an enormous amount of templates available too.

There are some tiny things about the app that aren’t perfect.

1. I was really happy when I found I could export my comics. Sharing is caring! I was less happy when I found out you can either share to miiverse or save your comic as images. Not both. You’ll have to choose.
2. Saving your progress takes ages. Perhaps I’m an impatient person but you can make yourself a nice cup of tea while you wait.
3. The name of your folder (read: comic project) can be a max of 13 characters, which isn’t a lot. A tad annoying.

Then there’s the tiny things that make me happy.

1. The title screen looks amazing and there are neat animations everywhere you look.
2. Great use of both buttons and touchscreen to get best out of your 3DS’ capacities.  Buttons for all the functions you use a lot, touchscreen for the rest. Scrolling is easy with the circlepad, zooming you do with the shoulder buttons and if you want to see the entire page you press (a).Don’t like the way the buttons are assigned? No problem! There always is button customisation.
3. The music is nice and relaxed without being intrusive. It might get slightly repetitive over time, but that’s okay, you need to focus on drawing anyway. I found 8 different melodies.

In conclusion: Definitely the best drawing app out there, if you’re willing to dive in deep. There are a lot of options and that might be a bit much for a beginner and it takes a whole to learn the ropes. That being said, the power of this app is mind boggling. Its semi-professional set of options make it awesome for drawing on the go.

• -Takes a while to learn
• -Tutorials aren’t too good
• -Slow saving
• +Very complete
• +Looks amazing
• +Options to share your work