LittleBigPlanet

This is a late review, and with good reason. When LittleBigPlanet was released a few months back, the development team repeatedly told us that the main draw of the game would be the ability to create and download our own levels, and to play online with our friends. The fact is that when I first tried the game, problems with LBP’s servers prevented all of these things – so I held off on my review and…forgot all about it. Sorry.

On an ultimately boring Boxing Day, I stumbled across the game and thought I’d give it a go to see if those gremlins had been fixed. To an extent they had been, so away I went, creating my own Sackboy in what has been deemed to be the game of the year by several publications.

LittleBigPlanet is undeniably cute. There’s no getting away from the fact that the various actions that the characters perform and the faces that they pull when you tap the d-pad to force them into one mood or another could make even the most stone-hearted player smile. When you’ve got four players in your “Pod” (your home base) and you’re all jumping around, slapping each other, sticking flowers on each other’s heads and generally causing mischief, the controllable emotions and the ability to control your character’s arms and posture can become a game in themselves as you begin to mess around with making your own Sackperson scenarios. Your friend hits you and a tap of the pad makes your Sackboy cry in the corner. The friend walks over and taps the drag button to simulate a hug, you make your Sackboy smile. Then you head off to pin a tail on to a fabric donkey and then climb on board to have a race in one of the early levels. And no, you haven’t been smoking anything strange.

It may sound insane, but this is creative play at its best. It’s the same as those days when – as a child – you played at cops and robbers or built a fort from a cardboard box. In short, the premise is good fun and the game gives you the tools to waste hours on doing absolutely nothing. Stephen Fry introduces you to the game with his rich-as-butter tones and given the on-screen madness that goes on, he fits the bill perfectly and really helps to raise the presentational bar.

Connecting up and running through some of the game’s levels with friends is great fun, with the clever checkpoint system meaning that only one of your group has to reach the next checkpoint for the game to continue. If you all get there, great…but if one of you falls to your death on some fabric spikes, your Sackperson will be appear out of the next checkpoint as soon as someone reaches it. This puts great pressure on one player if the rest of the group perish, especially if you’re using your last collective life. You just have to hope that the player with the most skill is the one that’s left. The multiplayer experience as a whole is great fun, but can be killed stone dead by some pretty shocking lag that can put paid to any precision platforming. The four 20mb connections that were used during my playing time should be able to handle something as simple as LBP without any noticeable problems, but that isn’t the case. You’ll die several times due to a one or two second bit of network-related slowdown, and it’s a pain in the backside when it happens. The ability to text chat has to be called into question too. If you have two players on a console in a multiplayer game and one of them expires, they can promptly hit their text chat button to pop the onscreen keyboard up. The problem here is that the entire screen becomes darkened and control is removed from the player that remains, and when you’re in the middle of a jump and that happens…you’re a goner. It’s a relatively obvious and easy way to cheat that shouldn’t be allowed to happen, especially not on a supposedly “family-friendly” game that siblings will be playing.

In single-player mode, there is a fair amount to do. None of it is particularly taxing by design, but a somewhat false sense of difficulty is added by the general wooliness of the game’s control system. You can get Mario to stop on a pixel if you have the skill, but the momentum of LittleBigPlanet’s characters can cause you to have to head back to your last checkpoint on more than one occasion as they overbalance, fail to jump as far as they “usually” do or – in some harrowing cases – leap about half an inch into the air before falling down into the fire below. The much-vaunted downloadable levels highlight this further, as some of the amateur designers out there are absolutely unforgiving with their layouts and its when you find one of these, that the game tilts over the precipice itself and becomes absolutely maddening as opposed to just a little bit frustrating.

Faults aside though – and those aren’t the only ones – LittleBigPlanet does become addictive quickly. You can’t help to notice the incredible prettiness of it all, and collecting items, stickers, decoration and points will become the focus of your entire life, if you don’t get too frustrated. Playing online will become a regular sport rather than an occasional dalliance, if you don’t get too frustrated. Downloading new levels to play when you’ve run out of single-player challenges will become a daily habit, if you don’t get too frustrated. Completing the story mode will become the only task you care about, if you don’t get too frustrated.

With LittleBigPlanet, Media Molecule have made something beautiful, and it really is so close to being both a wonderful creation tool, universe AND a stunning platform game. The platform part needed to take old-school gamers who actually like using skill rather than random numbers to calculate their success rates into account, but if you can get past that and the other niggles that – at the moment, at least – sit like gaping fissures on LittleBigPlanet, then you’ll have a blast and will be transported back to a time when you didn’t have to worry about work, relationships and money – a time when you just needed a cardboard box fort and you were all set.