GameSpy Review of Little Big Planet

LittleBigPlanet's success relies on its ability to be many things to many people, from a casual-friendly platformer to a toolset that enables fledgling designers to concoct their wildest dreams. Fortunately for PlayStation 3 owners, it performs those feats with remarkable aplomb. It's the first time in recent memory that gaming has seen a high-profile title that makes players work both sides of the curtain as both consumer and creator. Media Molecule's platformer is based on three ideas: Play, Create, and Share. Each of these elements works wonderfully in its own right, and that's key to why LittleBigPlanet is one of the year's best titles on any platform.





LittleBigPlanet puts you in control of a Sackperson. These cute, cloth creatures can be customized in a variety of ways with the items you collect from stage to stage. Controlling them is as simple as controlling any character in a side-scrolling platformer. Your core controls consist of jumping and grabbing; everything else expands from these two simple mechanics. You'll even have the ability to control their emotional expressions, from happy to fearful and from sad to angry, with a quick tap of the d-pad. It's all very easy to understand, but so much of the game's charm comes from the visual appeal of the characters. Your Sackperson exudes a special cuteness that's been missing from gaming since Katamari Damacy.












Play On, Playa





LittleBigPlanet's core game functions on a few levels. First, it's an introduction to the controls, a solid grounding in which proves useful when the game expands beyond Media Molecule's levels. Playing it also unlocks a wider range of materials to use in your own creations. The difficulty curve and approaches to puzzles and level design in these maps basically prime the player's mind to create their own levels. This is especially obvious in these first few days of release. It seems as though some of the more mediocre user-created levels might've been designed before playing Media Molecule's well-crafted stages.





Most importantly, each stage is simply fun. They're wonderfully diverse in aesthetic qualities, all themed around a specific geographic area. (Given how often some delve into odd but benign stereotypes, one must wonder how many times the London-based development team has visited Latin America.) From the English gardens that kick off the game to the beautiful Indian-themed stages of the later portions, each section is as dazzling to play as it is to see. The platforming gameplay is the best since Viewtiful Joe. Fortunately, there's enough to go around: LBP allows up to four people to jump on and play. In a few stages the game explicitly encourages multiplayer; some bonus items are unattainable without at least two people.





LBP's success also stems from its presentation. From the thread detail in your Sackperson to the richness of the environments it's a gorgeous game, through and through. The comparison to Katamari Damacy also applies to LBP's soundtrack. It's a mixture of music that range from the funky rock of Mexican band Kinky to DJ Krush's instrumental hip-hop beats, and they're just as well-placed as any of the visual motifs that permeate the experience.















It's tough to recommend LBP solely based on its story mode, as great as it is. It's the online that really carries this title, both in regard to stage creation and consumption. As of launch day, it's been a bit of a roller-coaster. On the first morning online, we had no problems trying out user-created levels. By the end of the day server issues brought the game to its knees to such a severe degree that even the menu for single-player games crawled. Since then, things are a little less bumpy, but it's not quite at the level we saw during Sony's pre-release beta.





One of the attractions of online is that you can play through story mode with your PSN buddies. In a nice touch, your Sackperson is even synched up to match your speech. Unfortunately, there's some lag when too many players are on a map, and we've seen performance that runs the gamut from a smooth experience to a slide show. Media Molecule announced that it's going to patch the game in the future to allow for online co-op level creation. Hopefully it'll resolve these launch day lag issues, because they're currently a bit problem. Offline, couch-based multiplayer is preferable to hopping online, as of the game's release.





Creationism and Evolution Can Co-Exist





Besides multiplayer, level design is a linchpin of the LBP experience. It's possible for budding stage designers to flesh out their visions without beating the story mode, but it seems that based on some of the user-created content floating around, many would be best-suited to investing time in playing the developer-created sections of the game. Creation itself is a mammoth undertaking, but isn't impossible. The game walks you through a variety of steps, including how to work within all three planes of LBP's "2.5D" levels and how to create... well, everything.












Most level designs will require at least an afternoon to really expand and build. Media Molecule gives you a few shortcuts, such as auto-setting your background, but anything else is up to you. Fortunately, there are just as many tools as there are items at your disposal. If you've devised a brilliant idea for a machine, you can save it, then copy and paste it throughout your level. If you're so inclined, you can take your created items and make them rewards for other players. One of the more ingenious trends online seems to be design tutorials, in which experienced level-makers create stages solely to instruct would-be Romeros and Miyamotos on how to construct proper bridges, build swinging items, and place environmental hazards. It's plainly evident that Media Molecule's toolset is vast and expansive, but anyone with enough time can design something decent. It's probably too intimidating for casual gamers, though; it's not really possible to jump straight into level design and expect to churn out something decent in 45 minutes.















Sharing is Caring





Fortunately, anyone can appreciate the fruit of thousands of gamers' labor on a daily basis. As vast as the level creator is within LBP, the community features are equally so. It's easy to search for levels, and it's equally simple to swim through several pages of user-generated content. The sharing section borrows from blogs and photo websites like Photobucket or Flickr, since each level can be tagged with a certain descriptor, such as "brilliant," "annoying," or "cute," among several dozen others. You'll be asked to rate and tag each level after you've completed it. If you're even more inclined to offer feedback, you can scroll over to a level descriptor to tell a creator that his/her level is great, or suggest what they can do to make the level better.





As of launch, the servers are awash with plenty of creations to sample, but it seems that the best-designed stages are the simple ones that do things completely off-the-wall. Whether it's calculators, basketball (with jetpacks and sponges, no less), or picking presidential candidates on the eve of Election Day, the stranger levels tend to prove more amusing than the more typical platforming creations, the designers of which often seem a tad sadistic in their approach. Regardless, there's a lot of content to choose from, and like Spore, LBP is a game that can only grow and evolve.












Even with launch day hiccups that prove a bit frustrating, LittleBigPlanet is indisputably one of the year's best titles. Its simplicity is deceptive; the easy platforming elements build in complexity in story mode to give gamers the best console side-scroller since Viewtiful Joe. The buzzword that's been tossed around a bit excessively is "creative." Granted, it's the root of a good third of the experience, but simply bandying the phrase "be creative" is a bit pat and can't accurately capture everything the game offers. Truthfully, LBP is a game rooted in production and consumption. The experience is hinged upon consuming and collecting in order to expand your depth and range when it's time to move into conceiving and concocting. Not everyone is going to offer a vision for others to experience, but the revolutionary nature of LittleBigPlanet ensures that gamers worldwide will be enriched a little more each time they turn on their PS3s.

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