Review
LittleBigPlanet Review (PS3)
Last time we saw something with a sack for a head was when we were having a chainsaw plunged through the jugular in Resident Evil 4. So, it’s nice to see something that is not only the complete antithesis of this terrifying image, but something that has come to symbolise a realm of immense possibility and hours of engaging fun. We are of course talking about LittleBigPlanet’s ubiquitous sackboy, an endearingly cute, woolly, beady-eyed little character that is yours to manipulate and customise to your heart's content. He's not only the star of the show with a range of adorable expressions controlled by twiddling the analogue sticks, shoulder buttons and D-pad, but he is also the focal point for the almost limitless set of tools that LittleBigPlanet gives to you. In essence, sackboy represents both your avatar and paintbrush for composing your very own potential platforming masterpiece.
In all probability you’ll have spent the last year absorbing the hype and coverage surrounding LittleBigPlanet, always wondering whether it would deliver on its ambitious promise. Essentially a powerful level design package, streamlined and refined to be as user-friendly as possible, LittleBigPlanet allows absolutely anyone to create something, anything, as basic or as elaborate as you like. As such the game opens with a lengthy tutorial (brilliantly narrated by Stephen Fry) introducing you to LBP’s fundamentals. Following this opening tutorial, you’ll have edited your first sackboy and been sent to your Pod – the game’s hub area where you can cycle through the game’s pre-fabricated stages as well as your own creations.
To begin with, tackling a few of the levels featured on the disc is the perfect way to become acquainted with sackboy’s world and get a few ideas to take with you to your first blank canvas. Having beaten a few stages, you’ll finally unlock My Moon, your planet dedicated entirely to your created levels. Selecting a slot inside one of My Moon’s craters transports you to your bare level template, which is then yours to do whatever you want with. Your entire toolset is accessed by pressing square to bring up the Popit menu, which is made up of a series of simple icons representing your basic options for creating levels. Upon selecting each option you’ll be presented with another Fry narrated tutorial, which can be skipped although we highly recommend taking the time to trawl through every one of these tutorials, as it’s the only way to unlock everything and fully exploit what LBP has to offer.
Once you’ve endured the entire learning process, it’s finally time to get building. Clearly, this is the crux of LittleBigPlanet – taking the time and effort to construct your own very world changing platform game. And while creating in LittleBigPlanet is incredibly simple to learn and get to grips with, constructing something truly special can take hours of hard work. Take for instance the first successful invention we managed to muster – a metal jet car for sackboy to ride in – took a good twenty minutes to build and refine. Cutting out the shape, tweaking the aerodynamics, attaching the wheels and rockets still produced a crude looking jet-powered turd on four shonky castors. Of course you can make your inventions more aesthetically pleasing by adding decals and stickers, although painting our jet turd a sickly shade of red and plastering it in colourful shapes didn’t help. Still the fact remains that in twenty minutes we had built something fun that we played and experimented with for an indeterminable amount of time before attaching rockets to a milk bottle and watching it fly around the screen.
And that’s it. Once you’ve been bitten by the LBP bug, there’s no going back. When you’ve made your own items, you can consult the capture feature to drag a box around your fabricated object and save it for future use. Experimentation then becomes the name of the game as you attempt to cobble together crude flying machines or a truck for your sackboy to thrash around in. And that’s before you’ve even thought about building a stage to drop your wacky objects into.
There are two main options to choose from the Popit window when building: Goodies and Tools. Goodies open up a menu that is home to all manner of materials, shapes and other readymade objects to drop into LBP. Tools let you embellish your creations, lending them context and purpose. For instance, you can bolt together a series of wooden shapes from the Goodies bag, add wheels and decorations, then bestow them sight and behaviour, by accessing the Tools which then allow you to customise every minute aspect of each mechanism, object or creature you create. So should you wish to give birth to your very own Frankenstein’s monster there are AI brains that you can attach to inanimate objects to bring them to life. We’re still vainly trying to build a gigantic walking robot that shoots lasers from its lobster claws though.
Simple things such as the swell of pride that you feel when you’ve successfully wired motors to the wheels of your first car stand out as one of the most rewarding feelings to be had playing a game. For every one of these successes you’re always thinking ahead to the next possibility, conjuring up new contraptions or devices and ever more fiendish designs and puzzles. If LBP fails to invade your dreams, you’ll be thinking about it on the way to work or you might even have a ‘eureka’ moment while you’re sitting on the loo.
Everything in LBP has a deliciously tactile physicality to it, which enforces the sensation that you’re actually crafting something. You can build a wall and wire up a lever to explosives to blow it up, or you can re-create a loving homage to your favourite Mario level or construct a nightmarish labyrinth of traps and switch-operated doors. Inserting traditional videogame mechanics into your levels is easy too, enabling you to insert vehicles, enemies and moving parts into the game with just a few button presses.
Each material in LBP has the exact real life properties that you’d expect too, so polystyrene is light, wood burns, rubber grips and metal is heavy. When constructing, you have to take these physical properties into consideration, so building a metal spaceship may not be advisable unless you’re willing to painstakingly attach hundreds of rocket boosters to get it off the ground. Which is also where gravity comes in. Before closing the Popit menu, its advisable to ensure that every component of your level is fastened together properly otherwise one loose connection can sabotage the whole thing. Should everything come tumbling down, a simple tap of left on the D-pad rewinds time to the last action executed while up toggles between pause and play. Locating the faulty wire or bolt is simple as you can easily float around with sackboy to the source of the problem.
Creating something of genuine worth in LBP can seem like a daunting task, and unless you’re prepared to put some time and care into assembling something, this can invariably be the case. However, the simplicity of making stuff in LBP renders the activity an absolute joy, with the only limit being your imagination. While this sounds like a predictable thing to say, in LBP’s case it’s completely true. However, if you want to get the most out of the game, you really have to think about what you’re doing and consider every possible angle. We actually found that sometimes it helps to plan something out using a pen and paper before jumping headlong into LBP’s treasure trove of goodies.
There’s literally nothing else like LittleBigPlanet on any other platform anywhere and almost stands as reason enough to buy a PS3 if you haven’t already. At its worst, LBP can be frustrating during the times that you’re unable to translate your fevered imaginings into tangible existence on screen, but at its best, LBP can induce moments of genuine satisfaction, making you feel like a god as you step back from your almighty creation and realise that it’s good. It’s very good. And even if you don’t get on with LittleBigPlanet as a building tool, there’s still plenty of single or multiplayer platforming fun to be had. Either way, you can’t lose. LBP is nigh on essential and if sackboy’s beady button eyes and cutesy smile don’t convince you of that fact, then you must have a heart of stone and a head full of fluff.
Top game moment: The first time you build something that actually works has you jumping for joy while making you realise that anything really is possible.
In all probability you’ll have spent the last year absorbing the hype and coverage surrounding LittleBigPlanet, always wondering whether it would deliver on its ambitious promise. Essentially a powerful level design package, streamlined and refined to be as user-friendly as possible, LittleBigPlanet allows absolutely anyone to create something, anything, as basic or as elaborate as you like. As such the game opens with a lengthy tutorial (brilliantly narrated by Stephen Fry) introducing you to LBP’s fundamentals. Following this opening tutorial, you’ll have edited your first sackboy and been sent to your Pod – the game’s hub area where you can cycle through the game’s pre-fabricated stages as well as your own creations.
 |
 |
|
| You can build monsters from winches and motors | Your Popit menu makes selecting items quick and easy |
To begin with, tackling a few of the levels featured on the disc is the perfect way to become acquainted with sackboy’s world and get a few ideas to take with you to your first blank canvas. Having beaten a few stages, you’ll finally unlock My Moon, your planet dedicated entirely to your created levels. Selecting a slot inside one of My Moon’s craters transports you to your bare level template, which is then yours to do whatever you want with. Your entire toolset is accessed by pressing square to bring up the Popit menu, which is made up of a series of simple icons representing your basic options for creating levels. Upon selecting each option you’ll be presented with another Fry narrated tutorial, which can be skipped although we highly recommend taking the time to trawl through every one of these tutorials, as it’s the only way to unlock everything and fully exploit what LBP has to offer.
Once you’ve endured the entire learning process, it’s finally time to get building. Clearly, this is the crux of LittleBigPlanet – taking the time and effort to construct your own very world changing platform game. And while creating in LittleBigPlanet is incredibly simple to learn and get to grips with, constructing something truly special can take hours of hard work. Take for instance the first successful invention we managed to muster – a metal jet car for sackboy to ride in – took a good twenty minutes to build and refine. Cutting out the shape, tweaking the aerodynamics, attaching the wheels and rockets still produced a crude looking jet-powered turd on four shonky castors. Of course you can make your inventions more aesthetically pleasing by adding decals and stickers, although painting our jet turd a sickly shade of red and plastering it in colourful shapes didn’t help. Still the fact remains that in twenty minutes we had built something fun that we played and experimented with for an indeterminable amount of time before attaching rockets to a milk bottle and watching it fly around the screen.
And that’s it. Once you’ve been bitten by the LBP bug, there’s no going back. When you’ve made your own items, you can consult the capture feature to drag a box around your fabricated object and save it for future use. Experimentation then becomes the name of the game as you attempt to cobble together crude flying machines or a truck for your sackboy to thrash around in. And that’s before you’ve even thought about building a stage to drop your wacky objects into.
 |
 |
|
| That famous skateboard shot. Again. | There are loads of readymade levels to explore for extra items |
There are two main options to choose from the Popit window when building: Goodies and Tools. Goodies open up a menu that is home to all manner of materials, shapes and other readymade objects to drop into LBP. Tools let you embellish your creations, lending them context and purpose. For instance, you can bolt together a series of wooden shapes from the Goodies bag, add wheels and decorations, then bestow them sight and behaviour, by accessing the Tools which then allow you to customise every minute aspect of each mechanism, object or creature you create. So should you wish to give birth to your very own Frankenstein’s monster there are AI brains that you can attach to inanimate objects to bring them to life. We’re still vainly trying to build a gigantic walking robot that shoots lasers from its lobster claws though.
Simple things such as the swell of pride that you feel when you’ve successfully wired motors to the wheels of your first car stand out as one of the most rewarding feelings to be had playing a game. For every one of these successes you’re always thinking ahead to the next possibility, conjuring up new contraptions or devices and ever more fiendish designs and puzzles. If LBP fails to invade your dreams, you’ll be thinking about it on the way to work or you might even have a ‘eureka’ moment while you’re sitting on the loo.
Everything in LBP has a deliciously tactile physicality to it, which enforces the sensation that you’re actually crafting something. You can build a wall and wire up a lever to explosives to blow it up, or you can re-create a loving homage to your favourite Mario level or construct a nightmarish labyrinth of traps and switch-operated doors. Inserting traditional videogame mechanics into your levels is easy too, enabling you to insert vehicles, enemies and moving parts into the game with just a few button presses.
Each material in LBP has the exact real life properties that you’d expect too, so polystyrene is light, wood burns, rubber grips and metal is heavy. When constructing, you have to take these physical properties into consideration, so building a metal spaceship may not be advisable unless you’re willing to painstakingly attach hundreds of rocket boosters to get it off the ground. Which is also where gravity comes in. Before closing the Popit menu, its advisable to ensure that every component of your level is fastened together properly otherwise one loose connection can sabotage the whole thing. Should everything come tumbling down, a simple tap of left on the D-pad rewinds time to the last action executed while up toggles between pause and play. Locating the faulty wire or bolt is simple as you can easily float around with sackboy to the source of the problem.
 |
 |
|
| Co-op is great fun. You can grab onto your buddy and solve puzzles together. Yay! | Balloons attached to a wooden platform. Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best |
Creating something of genuine worth in LBP can seem like a daunting task, and unless you’re prepared to put some time and care into assembling something, this can invariably be the case. However, the simplicity of making stuff in LBP renders the activity an absolute joy, with the only limit being your imagination. While this sounds like a predictable thing to say, in LBP’s case it’s completely true. However, if you want to get the most out of the game, you really have to think about what you’re doing and consider every possible angle. We actually found that sometimes it helps to plan something out using a pen and paper before jumping headlong into LBP’s treasure trove of goodies.
There’s literally nothing else like LittleBigPlanet on any other platform anywhere and almost stands as reason enough to buy a PS3 if you haven’t already. At its worst, LBP can be frustrating during the times that you’re unable to translate your fevered imaginings into tangible existence on screen, but at its best, LBP can induce moments of genuine satisfaction, making you feel like a god as you step back from your almighty creation and realise that it’s good. It’s very good. And even if you don’t get on with LittleBigPlanet as a building tool, there’s still plenty of single or multiplayer platforming fun to be had. Either way, you can’t lose. LBP is nigh on essential and if sackboy’s beady button eyes and cutesy smile don’t convince you of that fact, then you must have a heart of stone and a head full of fluff.
Top game moment: The first time you build something that actually works has you jumping for joy while making you realise that anything really is possible.
Videos
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LittleBigPlanet Trailer
04:02 | 2,139 views | 0 comments -
LittleBigPlanet E3 2008: Dream Trailer
01:30 | 1,355 views | 0 comments
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