LittleBigPlanet Review (PS3)

LittleBigPlanet will make you smile. But not because of its brilliant story or its excellent single player experience. In fact, the single player campaign is pretty average at best, engaging in some parts but a bit of a chore in others. It will make you smile because of the immense possibilities available within its online community and the sheer fun it provides because of it. It’ll also make you angry thanks to some infuriating gameplay problems that we thought side scrolling platformers had outgrown on the SNES.

Anyway, the single player bit. You’re tasked with travelling the world, visiting various areas such as English gardens at the beginning, the African savannah, India, Siberia, South America and Japan. Each area is supposedly “built” by a different king, much in the way that players will later be allowed to themselves. It’s no Super Mario World and it’ll be over in a short while, but completing the story mode is just a necessary precursor to the real fun of LittleBigPlanet and what makes it so great; creating your own levels and playing on stages that other people have made.

The world is created entirely from every day objects such as cardboard.

If you’re a creator, you really must complete the story mode to unlock all of the items and building blocks you’ll need to make your levels as good as possible. You’ll also want to listen to the ever-helpful Stephen Fry and his abundant tutorial videos. After you’ve done that, it’s time to craft yourself a fine level or three. Sadly, we’re shit at this bit – it’s complicated and time consuming, requiring great patience and dedication, when we’d rather run around playing the creations of other people. Fortunately, for people like us, lots of people are really exceptionally good at it – and this, for us, is where the fun really begins.

Finding great levels created by talented folk is easy thanks to an intuitive rating and tagging system that will ensure any good stages will rise to the top – and there are a lot of good ones already. You can spend literally hours just trying out new stages, marvelling at the amount of time that must’ve been spent creating it with a PS3 controller. One guy has managed to recreate classic shoot-em-up Gradius, which is absolutely astounding. The possibilities really are endless.

Boo!

But the fun doesn’t stop there. If you invite some friends along you can play it together. You’re all on the screen at the same time and you can team up to complete tasks or even hinder each other’s progress. Of course, you could just stand around making rude gestures at each other using the Sack-Boy facial expressions and puppet-like arm controls. The things you can do; creating levels, downloading other peoples’ stages and playing together with your friends make up for the rather uninvolving single player mode and then some, but it still isn’t perfect.

For a platformer that only requires left and right movement, a bit of jumping and some tricky 3D in-and-out of the screen negotiation, it has some serious gameplay issues. Jumping seems to be delayed and imprecise, often resulting in maddening death falls by over jumping or not jumping far enough. Moving to the back of the screen is often a little dodgy and pressing up doesn’t always do the job. Moving to the front of the screen is a similar story. The three depths available in this side scrolling platformer are there for a reason, but we can’t help thinking it may have been a little better without it.

Birds can be used to get to those difficult to reach places. Not round the U-bend, though.

LittleBigPlanet is flawed, yes, but it is also one of the most entertaining and fun games we’ve played this year. If it were released as a platform game with no online options and just the single player story mode, we’d be pretty unhappy with it. However, the endless possibilities with its online community make up for a lot of its niggles. Still, we can’t quite get over the fiddly controls and the lack of quality in the story mode. As for LittleBigPlanet being the PS3 title; Sony, we’re still waiting.

Rating: (Scoring policy)

By Jonny Robson

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Tags: littlebigplanet, sony

1 Comment to LittleBigPlanet Review (PS3)

1. [...] get you thinking here’s a nice little review of LittleBigPlanet on Snappy Gamer… Do you [...]
Three Speech: Semi-Official PlayStation Blog » Snappy Gamer says ‘LittleBigPlanet will make you smile’… on November 11th, 2008

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