LittleBigPlanet 3 is the first main title in Sony’s long-running series of creativity-focused platformers not to be developed by series creators Media Molecule. Developers Sumo Digital have been tasked with taking Sackboy on it’s latest adventure and, though they do a respectable job for the most part, LittleBigPlanet 3 still falls short of everything it promised it would be during it’s development.
The story has Sackboy’s world thrown into upheaval when the evil Newton, voiced with glee by the great Hugh Laurie, a egomaniacal inventor who unleashes a group of powerful titans to wreak havoc on the Creatosphere. It’s up to Sackboy to stop Newton’s plans by tracking down three legendary heroes who might be able to help.
These heroes are LittleBigPlanet 3’s much-heralded new playable characters. There’s Oddsock, a super-fast dog; Swoop, a bird able to glide into areas the other can’t reach; and Toggle, a larger, brawnier version of Sackboy who has the ability to shrink down to a miniscule size. They’re just as charming and memorable as Sackboy and just as much fun to play as. Oddsock finally allows players the ability to jump with precision that the series has been crying out for. He can wallrun too, which adds a great new dynamic to traversal.
Toggle is all about physics manipulation and Swoop adds tight flying and gliding controls. Neither of them really feels as solid as Oddsock, but the tricks they can pull off really do add a lot to LittleBigPlanet 3’s formula. The problem that I have with them is that they are woefully underutilised. The game’s story mode isn’t that long to begin with, and you really only get to use these new characters on their own single stage, and a single boss fight before reaching the final boss. You don’t even have all three of the new characters together before you hit the last level. For every other part of the game, you’re stuck with Sackboy.
That said, Sumo Digital have worked really hard to try and make Sacky feel a bit more interesting this time around, especially when stacked up against his new friends. There’s a new mechanic called the “Sackpocket” that basically allows you to store different items and power ups for Sackboy to use, like the Pumpinator that allows you to push or pull heavy objects. They definitely all help keep Sacky interesting.
One of the LittleBigPlanet series biggest draws has always been the inclusion of co-operative play. Indeed, the game was shown at E3 this year in a rather lengthy video that showed all four player characters working together co-operatively. It looked great and it seemed like something that was going to take the series in a new direction. Sadly, that sort of co-op play barely exists in the game and what little there is is quite hard to actually find.
Each of the game’s campaign levels are generally focused on just one character. You can drop in a second, but they’ll only be a copy of the character that level is based on. So you can only have two Sackboys, or two Oddsocks most of the time, not one of each. Each of the campaign levels is broken up by hub world levels and it’s here that you can find bonus stages that contain the ability to use all four player characters together. The mechanic that was touted as the thing that was going to take the series in a bold new direction has become little more than few buried minigames in the hub world.
It’s such a missed opportunity because those few levels that do let you play as all four characters co-operatively are so much fun and bring an element of chaos to the game that simply hasn’t ever been there before. They were so much fun and they left me wanting more of them.
You have to wonder if Sumo Digital might be hoping the lack of content in this regard might be fixed by the community instead. LittleBigPlanet’s other massive draw is it’s broad and dedicated base of user-generated content, and the content-creation tools on offer here are as deep and sophisticated as they’ve ever been. There are much better constructed tutorials and you can even make new items for Sackboy to carry around!
The entire game is hellbent on pushing you into the creative mindset, even during the campaign. Contraption Challenges see you trying to build vehicles of your own design in order to accomplish various objectives. You are presented with a problem and it’s up to you to figure out how to solve it. As much fun as they are, though, the Contraption Challenges still didn’t completely stop the paralysis that sets in when confronted with the blank and yawning creative mode.
Another area where Sumo Digital have hit the nail on the head is that every ounce of user generated content for the first two LittleBigPlanet games is available here on the next-gen version. This is fantastic because, if you’ve never played a LittleBigPlanet game before, you aren’t going to miss out on the literally millions of user-built levels, games, items and characters there are to check out.
There are still a few issues with this, though. Getting all that content to run in this new version is something of a technical marvel but it comes at a price. LittleBigPlanet 3 introduces the concept of layers. Previously, you could only move around within a specific 2D plane. LittleBigPlanet 3 allows for up 16 different layers, allowing you to move into the background. Impressive, but they’ve attempted to implement it retroactively which has led to some of the older content becoming profoundly borked (though Sony has released a day one patch that seems to have eased many of these issues).
Ultimately, LittleBigPlanet 3 left me a little cold. The switch to a new dev has brought the sort of clever changes and unswerving focus on creativity that make the series great back to the fore. But it refuses to completely commit to it’s vision. It’s unwilling to push it’s new characters and modes as hard as it should. The fans and the community are going to go to work on this thing right away and they’re going to build some truly impressive stuff with these new tools, that much is certain, but it’s hard to look at LittleBigPlanet 3 as much more than the promise of what could appear, fully formed, in future installments.
Review Score: 7.0 out of 10
Highlights: Charming visuals; new modes are fantastic; amazing user creation tools
Lowlights: Won’t commit to it’s ideas; extremely short campaign
Developer: Sumo Digital
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Released: November 26, 2014
Platform: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3
Reviewed on PlayStation 4
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