LittleBigPlanet

From day one LBP was a highly ambitious project. A game and video game designing tool rolled into one cute package. Things could have easily fallen flat, it could have been a good 2D platforming game with a few tacked on tools, simple level design, no real depth. Or, the whole thing could have proved over ambitious, and become vaporware. Luckily for us, MediaMolecule proved up to the task, and then some.

LBP is split into three areas: PLAY - CREATE - SHARE so I thought I'd split the review into such:

Play -

Play is an incredibly simple premise. You control a sackboy, you have to get your sackboy from the start of a 2D level, through obstacles and challenges to the end of the level. For the sake of argument, it's like any other 2D platformer you've ever played, with the slight twist that you have 3 planes of existance in your 2D world, your sackboy can jump closer, or further away from the 2D view. For such a small, insignificant sounding inclusion, this makes the world of difference. My only compaint is that alot of the time you don't have any choice of when your sackboy swaps planes, and even when you do have the choice, your sackboy refuses like a spoilt little brat. Apart from this, the game controls well, and you'll be able to pick up the simple controls as soon as you pick up a pad. X is jump, R1 is grab, it doesn't get any easier than this.

The levels shipped with the game are all designed with the ingame tools. Anything the developers have made, you will be able to recreate yourself, all it takes is a bit of brain power, some time and patience. It really opens your eyes to how powerful the ingame tools are. The levels the developers created are amazingly crafted and extremely varied, you'll travel from the plush green gardens to the barren ice cold wilderness. The overall level design and construction is incredible, you can tell a lot of time went into the main story mode, and it merits a purchase purely on this strength.

LittleBigPlanet's graphics are clean, crisp and clear, they fit the bill perfectly. You sackperson and objects in general all carry a good level of detail, without being over the top. The most noticeable graphical issue I've found is that sometimes when grabbing objects, your sackpersons arms will stretch to an insane length, it doesn't effect play at all, it just looks amusing. Apart from this, the only identifiable issue is LittleBigPlanet's overall cutesy look may put off a lot of people, who may write it off as a shallow kids game without giving it a proper chance.

As for the sound design, MediaMolecule have done an absolute bang up job. Stephen Fry narrates the game and also talks you through the creation tutorials. I believe they made a perfect choice here, it's hard to explain but his voice just fits in so well to the game. His voice over script is extremely well written and very funny. When it comes to the creation tutorial, his instructions are straight forward and clear, exactly what you need.

As for the music itself, MediaMolecule have grabbed music from many genres and compiled a memorable collection that compliments the game well. For example, you'll be bopping around the fun filled gardens to The Go! Team's 'Get it together' one level, and be met with an elaborate epic orchestral score for a big boss fight in the cold, unforgiving wilderness. The only serious complaint with the soundtrack came from a group of people who didn't like one of the tracks very much, so MediaMolecule changed it, and everyone was happy again.

From the cutesy feel to the game, you'll be forgiven for thinking that the game will be incredibly easy, as if it was mainly aimed at children. That is definitely not the case. You'll run through the gardens and maybe the safari with ease, but places like the frozen tundra will punish you. To make matters more complicated, hidden away in each level are many collectables, which will see you replay the levels time and time again to find every single object. Do so, and you will be rewarded with extra gifts. This also extends to 'ace-ing' a level, complete each level without dying, and you'll be showered with more gifts, in the case of the 'Bunker' level, this is definitely easier said than done. Chuck in areas unlockable only to 2x players and even 4x players, if you're a completionist you'll be here for a very long time.

If by some chance you get bored of the retail levels, you can dip into the user created levels. There's an incredible wealth of levels out there, ranging in quality, size and fun. As expected, there is a lot of rubbish out there, so if you do come across a level that's really dreadful, you can give it a 1 star out of five, give it a tag of rubbish and go off to find a better level. I definitely recommend dipping into the user created levels every so often, people are creating levels on par with the ones MediaMolecule shipped on the disk.

Create -

This is the meat and veg of the game, and I honestly can't do it justice in words, so I implore you to watch as many videos as you can on LBP if you're debating on buying this game. As I've mentioned, anything you've seen has been created using the ingame tools. You'll be able to knock out a simple stage in a few minutes flat, but creating levels that are more complex, with for example elevators, scripted machines, enemies etc will take considerably longer. You'll easily find yourself losing hours at a time in the creator, and if you're anything like me during the first week of creating, don't expect to get much sleep. You'll be lying there thinking about how to finish off your level until the early hours.

You have many types of materials at your disposal ranging from cardboard, glass, metal to dark matter which will stick in place, floating there unmovable. You can choose from a few predefined shapes like triangles, stars circles and squares for these materials. You can cut away at these shapes, add bits on to make your own creations. It's incredibly easy to do this, but will take some time if you're a perfectionist. You'll be creating objects ranging from cars to drawbridges, clouds, snakes, whatever you can put your mind to.

You'll have additional objects at your disposal as well, such as creature brains, pistons, springs, motor bolts. I really can't go into much depth here as we'll be here all day, but you really have to get your hands onto it to really appreciate how deep these tools go, coupled with switches, sensors and buttons, it's ultimately very simple and easy, but incredibly deep and complex. You really dictate how deep into the rabbit hole you want to go. People have realistically recreated side scrolling shooters, donkey kong and duckhunt. It's so powerful it's unbelievable. An example of this would be creating a car:

All you'd need is the main body, it can be as accurate or silly as you wish, create two rubber circles, attach a motorised bolt on the back wheel, and a standard bolt on the front and you have yourself a basic car in as little as 15 seconds. To spice things up a bit you could stick a bit of grabable foam onto your car, put a rocket on the back of the car. Put a 'grab switch' on the foam, connect the switch to the rocket and you've just pimped your ride. Each time your sackperson grabs the foam while cruising around, he'll get a nice bit of boost.

On the more simple side of things are STICKERS. LBP ships with alot of stickers that you have to unlock by playing the main game. They're hidden away, once you find one, it's yours forever to play around with in your create worlds.
If you can't locate what you want in the huge library of stickers, theres no need to worry. If you have a PSEye, you can take pictures of anything you want and put it in your level. For example, someone couldn't locate a photo of Rick Astley in the sticker library, so they whipped out their PSEye, took a picture and voila, an instant Rick Roll level.


Share -

Share is my main complaint about LittleBigPlanet, the idea is great and again very simple. You crack away at a level, give it a catchy title and put it out for the whole world to play. People like or hate your level, and give it a rating out of 5 stars, they can tag it with word from a library of predefined words, ie: beautiful, boring, complex, braaaaiiiinss etc etc. They even have an option to 'heart' those levels they really enjoyed, and even you as an Author if you do a good enough job.

It's worth noting that creating levels with your buddies is limited to offline only at the moment, MediaMolecule are due to include online creation in the future.

Simple in design, but it doesn't really work too well, purely because of the sheer amount of levels out there. The first few pages are dominated with the famous levels posted on game websites and the levels that give you trophies, it's practically impossible to locate the other good levels out there, as they're near the bottom mixed in with all the drivel people chuck out.

It's just disheartening, spending hours on a level, only for it to get 10 plays in 2 weeks, while 'FLYING SACKBOY LOL TROPHY IN 3 SECONDS' gets 20 thousand plays and 10 thousand hearts just because some muppet puts a platform on a powerful piston and publishes it.

I expect this will improve over time as alot of the timewasters lose interest in LBP, so the rubbish stops and the trophy giving levels fade out of the limelight so the real gems can come out to shine.

Summary:

LBP has lived up to the hype, and then some. It's truly a game you must play to really appreciate how great it is. My only complaint is that I spent ages on my level, and in the 2 weeks it's been live, only 11 people have played it, while lesser quality levels appear on the front page and never shift. But you can probably just chalk that up to me being grumpy and jealous.

Put quite simply, LBP was built to last. You'll spend hours trying to locate all the items across the main game, and trying to ace the later levels will provide hours of hair-tearing frustrating fun. If you have a creative mind, and the desire to build you'll be lost in 'Create' for weeks. MediaMolecule have done an amazing job of making such powerful tools accessible for the average person, and I don't see myself getting bored of creating in a long, long time.

I'm looking forward to seeing what MM does with LBP, I hope they support it beyond customizable sackboy clothing and release new materials, new sound clips and some new elements like water.

Failing that, we'll just have to settle for LBP 2.

Visuals: 9
Audio: 9
Gameplay: 10
Design: 9
Multiplayer: 7
Value: 10

Overall Score: 9/10

THE GOOD:
Revolutionary idea pulled off perfectly
Amazing graphical and sound direction
Extremely easy to pick up and play
Create mode is simple yet insanely powerful
User levels add months of life onto the game

THE BAD:
Server issues, game suffers from lag quite a bit.
Sharing needs a bit of a revamp
Some people find sackboy's jump to be too floaty.
Some may find the graphical direction a turnoff.

THE COMMENT:
Online 4 player creating due in the future.