Little Big Planet in-depth review

I already covered Little Big Planet back in the beta, well mostly how the game works. So I won’t repeat what has already been said, just go back to it if you want details on that part, since most of it is pretty much the same, just more polished. So here’s my Little Big Planet review!

This is your pod. A whole world of possibilities is open to you from here. You can also decorate it to your liking

Play
For those that expected the story mode to be just an add-on to the creation and online play part, well, you were…. Wrong. While not as long as I expected, the single experience can take you between 4 and 7-8 hours to go through, depending on your skill level. I’ll be honest; I didn’t really notice the time going while playing through the story mode, which has a silly storyline, but a good one nonetheless for what it attempts to do. I must say, I wanted more of Media Molecule’s levels when we kicked the final boss ass. But it wouldn’t be fair to say it wasn’t enough either, and obviously, MM will release some DLC in the future to expend the story mode, or they’ll just use the cool levels feature themselves to expend on the game, since their levels uses the same engine available to users, but anyway, that will be covered later on.

The gameplay from one world to another varies greatly, and the challenge keeps getting higher. While the early levels are somewhat easy, later on, we found ourselves starting over and over the same levels, as we would get our ass kicked over and over and over again. I said we, because I played about the last third of the game with vluk through the PSN network. Now during Beta, I had mentioned how much of a lagfest this game was when playing with others online. Well it seems the problem was either fixed by MM or me using wired Internet instead of Wireless, helped greatly, which probably is both of those combined.

Each worlds, there are 8 of them, contains 3 full levels, then a few mini-games levels you unlock by finding keys in the full levels. Then there is an additional level in the last world, the final boss fight, The Collector! Now there’s always insensitive going back through previous levels once you completed all of them, (or even before that), as you’ll have found stickers that unlocks prizes bubbles you couldn’t access before. If you’re the must get 100% in all levels kind of person, you’re in for quite a challenge. You’ll need to go through all of the levels without dying, to get the “aced” prize for each of them. While some levels can be easily or average in difficulty and with a few tries, you can pull it off, some others will give you a hell of a time, as there’s a lot of cheap deaths in them, that are hard to avoid, no matter how many times you did it, especially when you have to move explosives. Looking for prize bubbles is really one of the pleasures of the game, as you’ll always want to check every little corner to try and not miss anything. And half of your deaths if not more will be coming out of this.

Those sombreros are pretty resistant to the heat!

I’ll go briefly through the controls and what you can do in the create mode to interact with your environment, in case I missed something during the beta impressions. You jump with the X button, nothing revolutionary here, but you’ll want to know that the sackboy’s jump isn’t a Mario kind of jump, and while the jump height’s and length is pressure sensitive, it feels much more “spacy” and less controllable then Mario’s jump. (There’s no doubt here, Mario is the jumping standard, and Sackboy is no Mario, unfortunately, though not everyone minds this.) Next in importance, (I’ll skip the movement which goes with the Left analog stick), is R1, which you use to grab stuff (and other sackboys). Then there’s the fluff, holding L2 and/or R2, gives you control of your Sackboy’s side-respective arms, swinging them with the analogs sticks while you’re still holding them. If you swing hard enough, you’ll slap down other players. Moving the sixaxis will move your sackboy’s head, and if you press L3, you can switch to torso control, giving you the overpowered possibility of doing hula-hoops. The d-pad controls the emotions. Up will make you happy, left, scared, down, sad, and right angry. You can press the same direction up to three times, rendering a stronger emotion. You can also use a microphone in-game, and talk with others online, and watch your sackboy’s lips synch with what you say.

Finally, the square button (it deserves its own paragraph), pops-up your pop-it menu. In this menu, you can do multiple things. For here I’ll only cover what is available in the Play mode. There’s the heart, that let’s you pull out the stickers and decorations that you added to your favourites. There’s the stickers and decorations themselves, which let’s you put anywhere (even on you and other sackboys) stickers and decorations, other then the costumes that already exists. I like putting random things other people’s head I play with. Please note that these things don’t affect gameplay. Next is the costume menu, which let’s you change the way your sack person looks like. You start with a decent amount of things to wear, but by the end of the game, you’ll have tons of choice, and there’s also free and paying download content coming our way. There’s already an astronaut and a Halloween costume available temporarily free on the PlayStation store. There’s also the suicide option. Stucked? This is the solution, go back to the last save ring you passed through, but this will cost you a life. To learn how the life system works, please read my first impressions post, linked at the top of the page. The last one lets you write text to communicate with the other players, if you don’t have a microphone.

Now the game isn’t without faults either, there is one bug from the beta that I would have expected to be gone by now. I’m not sure if I’ve seen this happen outside of the user generated levels, but in certain situation, your sackboy will transform into Mr. Fantastic and stretch his arms so much grabbing on things you shouldn’t be able to grab on normally. This seems to happen a lot less then in beta though.

The platforming is done through 3 depths of layers. In general, this works well and some type of AI figures out which of them is the more likely you want to be on a given moment, but sometimes, the AI makes a bad choice for you and you die because of it. I can only hope they rework this a bit more, but it’s not anything anywhere game breaking, just that’ll you might end up cursing the first time you’re about to beat one of the harder levels and end up losing your last available life because you landed on the wrong layer. This is more of a problem in user created levels, once again, because players won’t always polish their level as much as Media Molecule did with theirs.

This gas is pretty deadly, you better run for it!

As for the jumping controls, well, I have no real issue with it, I think it’s a choice against another to go with this type of jumping, but not everyone shares my view on this. I invited a girl friend to come and try the game; she was very much interested in coming and try this game I had mentioned to her before. One thing to mention is that she never really played any PlayStation games before, so she’s not used to the controller. She has a GameCube, and mostly plays pc games, and mostly World of Warcraft. She had a hard time with figuring out the controls, (and the controller), and while she could follow me through the early levels, she soon got bored before getting a good hang of the game. Take this for what’s it is worth, but this game should be a system seller, and still seems to outcast newcomers? Hmmm… I guess there’s still some work to do before getting some parts of the market to get into console gaming.

Create
This is what Little Big Planet is so famous for, the create-a-level section. In this mode, you’re free to build levels any way you see fit. You can let your imagination run wild with what you’re given, which is a hell lot. But there are some limits, sadly, as concepts I would think of just can’t be done. This will be covered after the good part.

In this mode, you’re given access to two additional features in the pop-it menu, the ability to fly through the level in the frontal layer and the ability to rewind time/pause time so that you can fix your mistakes and take your time to place stuff.

This is just one of the numerous items the game give you access to. And it doesn't stop to those, you can make anything you want too.

The first pop-it menu is there to build your environment mostly. You’ll be able to choose a material and make shapes with them, then alter them in many ways, in an almost unlimited way. Different materials have different attributes, some are lighter then others, some you can grab, some you can’t, some floats, some stays at the height they are set to, others will fall to the ground if in suspension in the air. The only real limitation with this is the PS3’s capacity, as you add stuff, a thermometer will build up and you can add stuff until it’s filled. I didn’t mess around the creation part enough to know what exactly happens when you reach the limit, but for most of us, I doubt it is a concern, and seeing what people came up with, it doesn’t seems to be, as you can always do your levels in different parts. In this menu, there’s also pre-made objects you can select from.

Just a few notes here, the more you play the story mode, the more things you’ll have unlocked by picking up prize bubbles, letting you use more things in the creation mode. Also, the game offers tutorial for pretty much everything, they are very clear, and narrated by Stephen Fry, Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy’s narrator.

So the next pop-it menu is the Tool bag. Now that’s interesting, as this is what replaces “programming”. Here you’ll find tools to transform stuff into dangerous items, like putting in flame a platform, making it electric, or transform it into a gas cloud. You can put spikes and bombs too. More then that are the different switches systems that let’s you tie them to your contraptions to make them active under different conditions, and act in different way, depending on how to set them up. There are also, springs, strings, piston and a lot more that makes your world move.

Now you’re probably wondering, what about enemies? How do I make those? This is made easily by letting you add a brain to what you want to be an enemy. Well there’s actually more stuff you can add to it, like eyes (that looks at you), legs (for movement) and more. But the brain is what you want to know about. You can decide if your monster will jump, if he walks toward you, run away from you, or just does his own thing. You can decide if it’s killable or not (there’s two types of brain, one breakable, and one not breakable). Some people online managed to do amazing things with this, others, well they failed, but they’ll give you a good laugh.

Meet my new family!

I could go on all day about the things you can do in this mode, but I’ll cut it at that and go the problems I have with this mode.

Take this one with a grain of salt, because it is based on the beta build, and I didn’t get that problem with the release version, but it might still be a problem out there. I was making a big monster you had to climb to the top of, with several obstacles, and at one point in my messing around, one part of the level became very glitchy and would slow down everything once I would walk through it, and some weird texture appeared at the point where this happened. The problem really stayed to the point where it first happened even when I moved everything elsewhere, so this was really weird. Is this still happening? I doubt so, since the build of the beta was an older build. And well, this was more a promotional demo then a beta, in my opinion, as there was no easy tool to report this kind of glitch.

Other then that, sometimes it’s frustrating how you try to do something, but it just doesn’t work the way you want. Let’s say you glue two things on a bigger object. Then decide to unglue one of the two, then the other one will sometime unglue too. This doesn’t happen all the time, but when you have multiple things glued together, this can get very annoying. Other times, you’ll be struggling to find out how to make it so people don’t land a particular layer when playing your level, like I mentioned before.

But other then that, the creation tool works like a charm, and is probably the most powerful/user-friendly tool out there for user-created content. But there’s a few things that are absent that I would like to see added in the game as expansions or dlc some time down the line. I’m sure Media Molecule planned some of these things, but I guess making the whole thing work and stay user friendly is quite the challenge. I hear you could originally play 7 players in one level, but they downed it to 4 for lag and framerate issues I assume.

😦

But the possibility to create powerups would have been nice. There is a jetpack, which can be put to some original uses. But other then that, it’s pretty limited. I would have liked to see a way to use some weapons with your sackboy, swords and projectiles kind of weapons would have been great to make the gameplay even more varied. I also would have liked to be able to control the gravity of my levels. The ability to give sackboy the possibility at some places to slow down, accelerate or stop time. The ability to use warp doors or portals, as in stepping on a platform and being sent to another one. Finally, be able to add water to the level and the ability to swim. I’m sure some creative people will be able to do some of these, but easier tools to make those would be nice additions.

Share

The last part of the game’s motto is sharing. By now, other users have submitted hundreds of levels. Some good, some bad and some just awful, but simply because there are some just so awesome, it’s worth your stop. Would you believe someone actually managed to make a Gradius type level? That’s a spaceship shooter type of game, with the laser shooting and everything. The concept? Your sackboy is in a jetback in the background you don’t see, but what you see is your spaceship and control pretty much how you would expect it. Using R1 will let you fire your laser and shoot at things. I don’t know much more about the mechanics, but the guy behind this RRR3000 or something is a genius.

Once you played through a level, you’re asked to rate it on a scale of 5 stars, and then a keyword to define it. The more a keyword is selected by a user, the bigger it’ll be in the level’s display sheet.

Hakuna matata! Where's Timon and Pumba?

It’s just too bad there’s not a better way to filter the levels. You select the ones you play from the main planet, or you can use a search function by keywords or search for the name you’re looking for. But you can’t pullout only those rated 4 or 5 stars. You can also select quickplay, which will make you join some other people’s party. But personally, the only times I select this, is by mistake.

The game really shines when you play with your friends. I joined two other friends last night and we ran some tough user created levels and it was a blast. Most levels were so hard that we gave up before finishing them, after 3-4 tries. They were hard, but the good type of hard, surprisingly, not just simply cheap.

Final thought
This game is amazing; one of the best games released in the last 5 years, if you don’t have a PS3 by now, this should make you change your mind, especially if you’re an old school gamer. That, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Valkyria Chronicles (which I just can’t wait to get my hands on tonight) are now enough reason to get the PS3. No more “but there’s only one game I want to play on it”. If you really think that, you just didn’t take the time to look into the PS3 library carefully enough. (I’ll get a 360 this spring most likely, just give me the time to find some place to put it in my room, and Star Ocean 4 to come out.) Sony needs to hurry up and release this game bundled with a 80gb PS3 and two dual shock 3 controllers.

Invite some people to play with you when you get this game, or play with some friends online. For the price of admission, this is definitely a worthy ride. One you’ll likely play for a long time.

This is Gaming 2.0!

Pros
– Incredibly strong creation tool
– Amazingly fun story mode, especially for those who like to look around for hidden stuff and those looking for a well-balanced challenge
– Varied gameplay
– 4 players coop
– Cute, beautiful animations and characters

Cons
– Some bugs are still in the game (nothing too bad, but it’ll frustrate you a few times)
– No way of filtering the levels by ratings, only by keywords, which are often chosen randomly by the users.

More screenshots

The icy world is the most challenging of them all! Get ready to start over a few times. Unless you're Chuck Norris, of course.

He's not the prettiest thing in the world.

Need a lift?

* All screenshots are taken from the LBP official website.