Little Big Planet Late Review

Games nowadays really need innovation of some sort to survive the harsh environment of the game development industry. And it’s where little big planet climbs up a notch higher than the other games. Innovation. A fellow playstation 3 fanboy mentioned that only 25 developers were utilized to create this game; pretty small for a development team. Even small studios like Insomniac studios utilized about 40 in their team to create Resistance.

Little Big Planet

What makes little big planet unique is that they turned a simple platform into something like what most people do best when they are just idling around; doodling. And placed it into a world perfect for it. As little as a paper could be, it could spawn ideas bigger than the planets we know. And you can even share it to the world. Little big planet has established a solid community of aspiring level designers for them to freely share their own creation (And probably scout future game designers too, that’d be a good starting point for those aspiring ones out there). That’s the selling point of little big planet.

You play around with Sackboy/Sackgirl as your sort of Avatar within the game. Controls are simple. It’s just like your old super mario platformer with an added .5 dimension. You have the freedom to stick around stickers in the stage which in turn would sometimes unlock several items for you to use in the level editor. Characters spawn from weird to weirder. Some are as much weird as Katamari but not quite. Katamari is still the king of cuteness combined with weirdness. The physics system is great; I don’t know if this one is an inhouse physics engine or 3rd party ones like NoVoDex or Havok but it feels airy and bouncy. Level design, as far as I am right now is pretty much above average; I was expecting a little bit higher but the ones I saw are already doable. I haven’t touched the editor but as far as I’ve seen from user created levels on youtube, it looks very customizable. I think some objects are relatively scriptable which is a plus to modders and aspiring game designers.

Drawback I guess is the repetetive nature of the gameplay. I don’t know if they would patch this one up as future downloadable contents but as far as I’m in the game (and I think I’m done with the tutorial), the number of things to do is very limiting. They should’ve put more things that sackboy/sackgirl can do. I just wish that they put in a powerful scripting tool which can spawn some cool new objects like those in incredible machines or better yet, can make sackboy/sackgirl do more things than what they can right now.

I’m actually interested at how they programmed this game. They must’ve incorporated an extensive use of design patterns with this one because the level of extensibility required by the project would be quite heavy.

I’d give it a 4.5/5 score as a general score. Relatively fun. No brainer. It doesn’t need sex or violence to sell. Great for kids to grannies. More of casual though.