The Sack Attack is Back... Sorta
LittleBigPlanet: Game of the Year Edition is everything you'd imagine it to be a nothing more. No, that's not a bad thing.
Published: October 11, 2009
The single-player levels themselves take you from one little garden around the world, slowly incorporating more and more challenging bits of platforming and just a wee bit of problem solving along the way. For every level in the game, you're rewarded for getting through things without losing a life, for collecting every object in a level and, initially, just for finishing. The levels are often littered with multiple hidden passages and alternate routes, some of which require you to tackle things with up to four players. You can get everyone together on one couch, of course, provided you actually have four controllers, but the simpler option is to just play the levels online with friends.
The online implementation of LittleBigPlanet is also insanely well done. So long as you're connected, you have the option of playing any level in the game solo or with friends, and if you happen to pick up a controller locally, you can sign in with another profile on the PS3 to migrate that sackperson over or just sign in as a plain guest. Online, people can (and often will) pop in randomly, so check gates were set up to prevent someone from hopping in midway through a level and breaking everything.
As polished and gorgeous as everything is (seriously, some of the textures in the game are absolutely stunning in their clarity and detail), there are the odd bits of technical slip-up here and there. Clipping is something of a problem -- particularly if your sackperson has things attached to their head or limbs, as they'll pop through objects above them -- though it rarely, if ever, actually impacts the gameplay. Physics issues, however, can, though it's almost always relegated to user-created levels where something has gone wrong.
Actually creating the levels is a fairly involved process, so much so that you'll likely spend well over an hour just going through all the tutorials and video lessons. It's a necessary evil, though, as learning the guidelines and rules of how LittleBigPlanet levels are made is paramount when letting your imagination run wild. Much was done to simplify things as much as possible (to make an enemy for instance, you need only give them a brain and a means of locomotion, though you can tweak almost everything about their movement and behavior with a few sliders and switches at your leisure), and for the most part, even a newcomer can go from bare canvas to an interactive experience in just a few minutes. It may not be especially complex, but it'll at least work -- provided you spent the necessary time going through the tutorials.
Your own levels are stored separately from the single-player "planet" (as is all the community/online stuff), and you're given plenty of control here too. You can take an existing level and copy it, allowing you to build in a base construct and tweak things to accommodate everything from exploration to races to just making something more involved, but you can also set up a name, give it a description and effectively duplicate the process that Media Molecule went through for their own levels, even if most will likely pale in comparison to the execution of the game's original concepts.
Even in the beta, I could see users creating levels with the same ideas as some of the stuff found in the later single-player levels, and the difference was, not surprisingly, rather pronounced. That's not to say some of the levels weren't brilliant in their own right, and at times the ways they executed those concepts in unorthodox ways that were utterly fascinating, but the final product was almost always bettered by the handiwork of the developers, which certainly makes sense.
Actually taking everything online is where things get even more messy, in both good and bad ways. Users that play your level can comment on it, tag it with a handful of different descriptors, heart it for easy replaying later and/or heart the author of the level to see more of his or her stuff. It's a fairly easy process, but the tags are sometimes way, way off, and the whole process starts to seem a little pointless when you see just how much content goes up on an hourly basis -- and that was just the beta. Sorting through all the user-generated content takes quite a bit of filtering, and moving around from one little patch on the online planet to another can be a klutzy, slightly frustrating exercise. Still, like the platforming, once you learn the particular quirks of the interface, it's quite manageable.
