I received LittleBigPlanet Saturday from GameStop, about 5 days after its original (solid) release date before all of the Qu’ran passages in the background music hoopla. Since it was earlier than the “official”, delayed release date, the servers for uploading and downloading custom content and levels were not available. So, for now, this will be a review of the “offline” version of the game, namely the story mode as played with two people, myself and my girlfriend. I’ll start with how the game works then follow with impressions. I will say, though, after following this game since they demonstrated it at GDC in 2007, I wasn’t let down; I got pretty much exactly what I expected the game to be.
Playing the game
You play as a little character known as “Sackboy” (or “Sackgirl”, depending on how you dress the little guy) running around through a semi-2D, side scrolling, physics-controlled world. By little I mean you’re about as tall as a teacup, and the scenery and objects you interact with, such as teacups, often reflect this.
As soon as you start the game, you’re placed in a narrated level (also doubling as the credits) which walks you through some of the basic concepts of the game such as running and jumping. Once completed you land in what is known as your pod. It’s a little cardboard birdcage of sorts which I think is supposed to be a rocket ship or space station. This can be painted and customized mostly to your liking with colors, stickers, and other decorations you find in the game using a little pop-up menu called the “Popit” menu.
Initially, from your pod, all you see ahead of you is the planet earth or, at least, a stitched ball that looks like the earth. Using a PlayStation controller laying on the ground (the “puter”), you can use Sackboy to interact with the planet through the story mode to select a new level to explore.
For the most part, every 3 or 4 levels or so represent a single story line. These are loosely connected as you progress to later levels and kind up get wrapped up together in the ending set. Each story, though, usually follows the pattern of “something/one is lost, find it/them for me”. There’s very little depth, and the stories themselves seem only to provide a bare bones reason to continue playing. In the end, you’ll find the final message simply being “Make and share your own levels!” And really, that’s the main draw of this game.
Every time you complete one level, another appears. By finding keys inside each level, you can open up mini-levels. Mini levels include games like bull riding, or a Line Rider clone in which you usually just try not to die or beat the clock to the finish for a high score. In total, there are story mode 51 levels, including the minigames.
Along with the keys, other items can be found as you go through the story mode, such as new clothing for Sackboy, or new materials or decorations for level editing or decorating your pod.
After you beat, I believe, 3 levels, new planets appear next to the earth. To the left some sort of community planet where you can download levels, get news, etc. which was not functioning as of Sunday night when I last played since the servers were down, and to the right, a moon (“My Moon”) where you create and save your own custom levels.
My Moon is where excitement is. There you can create your own levels with the same tools used to create all the levels in the game - mostly. I say mostly because not everything in the game can be created with the in-game editing tools. There are more complex, pre-defined objects which cannot be created in LittleBigPlanet and were obviously imported from other sources. These include objects like shoes, hats, and pretty much anything with any kind of complexity to it. The bottom line is, you have a collection of these objects to work with, and basic tools for creating platforms and interactive objects that gives you the potential to fully recreate any of the story mode levels if you wanted to. And as you play through the story mode, with this in mind, you often think to yourself how clever this contraption was, or how the developers came up with a good idea doing this or that, and this gives you more ideas for your own levels. There’s also the fact that you find additional decorations and objects in story mode to use when creating your own levels giving you incentive to play it.
Editing tools include stamps for stickers and decorations and “drawing” tools for materials that would ultimately represent platforms, barriers, or other custom objects in the scene. Materials include wood, sponge, glass, and metal, among others, each which have their own unique properties and weight. Some even have no weight or float when released into the world. Basic “building” aside, the real fun comes with the interactive controls such as switches and buttons which in turn can trigger things like explosions, rotating gears, or rockets. There seems to be a huge range of possibilities with the tools available.
There are a collection of videos I think are pretty funny (because of the guy talking and screaming) that show some of the custom objects/designs made in the game’s beta:
[list]
[]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3P1x-RmmnU
[]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lldyZiIEMDM
[]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0xURf_gPg0
[]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsAdfEHQLCo
[/list]
And this level I think was just pretty well done:
[list]
[*]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBJlkpTIw48
[/list]
Impressions
Graphically, everything is beautiful. Colors are well chosen and the pallet of building materials and decorations make the game consistent and help enforce your character’s size and sack-ness. You will often see clipping between objects, especially with the characters, but I think that’s mostly a given and expected with our current state of technology. Given that physics drives the gameplay, I doubt little can be done about that. But otherwise, the modeling, textures, and lighting do wonders for this little side-scroller and really bring to life the environment. And I think a reason for this is that the style lends itself to simpler geometry.
The main complaint other people have about the game is the controls. And definitely, if anything will frustrate you about the game (other than creating your own levels) its the controls. Since the game is 2D but has 3 levels of 3D depth, the game has certain logic that determines when you go into and out of the various depths. In a way its much like any other multi-level side scroller. If there’s a level above you in another depth, if you jump high enough, you’ll land on that level. If you want to come back down to the level before, hold down as you jump and you’ll jump down to it (think of playing Contra). This works most of the time, but inevitably, you’ll run into situations where you’ll want to jump here but the game thinks you meant there - and there’s not much you can do about it.
Additionally, it can be really hard to judge jumps given the effect that the physics of the world has on you. This is not totally horrible; you can certainly adjust to it, but it will throw you for a loop at first. For example, if you have a springy platform that you’re using as a trampoline to jump higher, the best place to jump as you’re springing yourself higher and higher is not at the apex of the platform as it reaches its highest point. You actually want to jump at its midpoint going upward since at that point, the platform has the highest vertical velocity giving your jump that much more lift (much more than the additional height achieved by the platform as it approaches the apex).
One could also say the story mode is weak. And I kind of agree to that. It’s not long; you could easily work through it in a day. However, this game focuses on user-created content so that’s really where emphasis was placed. Story mode mostly seems like a “look what you can do!” to me. But, the story mode is also where a lot of creation mode objects exist as hidden items, so you’ll certainly spend some time there if you’re trying to collect everything in the game. I personally have only one 100% for any of the levels and have no idea where to look for missing objects in at least one other.
Regardless of the “story” aspect of it all, the game is a lot of fun to play. There are lots of environments and creative obstacles that are both challenging and intriguing. Its also a blast to play with more than one person. I mostly played with my girlfriend (who had to deal with me talking about the game a lot before the release but eventially came to love it after she played it). The more people you have, the harder it is, since everyone needs to keep up and be able to overcome all the obstacles, especially if near a respawn location since they’ll keep coming back and have to try again (away from them, other players can continue until the dead player is respawned at the next location). There are even some places where more than one player is required to get certain items which makes multiplayer vital to completing the game at 100%.
Most of the above I expected. I’ve seen screenshots and videos, and read about all the control complaints which turned out exactly as I imagined them. What I wasn’t expecting was the difficulty of the edit mode.
While I love the edit mode and the flexibility and possibilities it provides, I’m finding that I suck at it. It can be really hard to make “stuff”, especially if you have no idea or plan on what to make. I’m not really blaming the game so much on this one, instead mostly targeting myself. But I can say that there are some things I would change to make it easier to use. This includes the speed at which things are moved on the screen and other tiny nuances such as the implementation of the grid setting (which I think should be user based). Also the camera can get really far out with multiple people editing making it hard to see what you’re doing in detail (fact of life?). I think with practice, though, and going back through all of the tutorials in more detail will help me in being able to deal with the editor with a little more proficiency.
Conclusion
All in all, the game is really cute and enjoyable. Most of the replay value will come in the form of user-created content, so we’ll see how that turns out. I know that’s something that kept me playing games like StarCraft and Unreal Tournament for years. I think LittleBigPlanet will benefit the same. I’m not sure this is the killer app Sony wants it to be, though. In the end, it feels like any another run-and-jump platformer. The big win for this game is the creation tools. But is that enough to win everyone over? Or just the game developer wanna-bes? Well, my not-so-much-a-gamer-girlfriend loves it, maybe even more than me (I’m all about the creation aspect, though a little bummed I still suck at it), so it must be worthy 
[size=6]9/10[/size]
