When the latest generation of consoles was off to a start and the fanboy wars were still settling in with their hardware, it was tough to defend the PS3. The launch titles had a lukewarm reception, and besides a few upcoming titles that wouldn’t be seen for years, it didn’t look like it was going to gain a lot of momentum in comparison with the already established Xbox 360 and the newly minted Wii. Even some of the most steadfast Sony fans were apprehensive to the system, perhaps waiting for a big new release or a lower price-point, and I joined their cynicism for the platform initially. The first big hope for the PS3 came at GDC 2007 when Phil Harrison (formerly Sony executive) came out at showed of the Next Big Thing…LittleBigPlanet. It was charming, inviting and looked like something fundamentally different than anything they had tried before, showing off a social gaming style and world creation on a scale that hadn’t been seen before. A year and a half later, the game has finally hit store shelves, on the back of a PS3 that has its momentum back, but the excitement for the title is still teeming.

For those unaware, LittleBigPlanet is essentially a 2D platformer in a 3D landscape. You control Sackboy, a tiny doll-like character made of burlap stitched together, who can leap around the world and grip onto any surface that allows it. You enter each level, traverse the world within and eventually reach and endpoint. And, to be honest, that’s really the basis of the controls, it is actually that simple. What LBP does different is how that world exists, in that all the levels are built from a creation mode that is available in the game. The same tools the developers use to make all the tutorials and the single player levels is exactly what is available to you to carve your own path. Of course, you can play your own levels, but you can also publish them for the whole world to see, and that world is always available to you. Friends can invite you into their games, you can do the same to them, you can traverse random player-created worlds at any time, rate them, comment on them, favourite them and their authors and generally explore every piece of content that has been created all over the LittleBigWorld.

The game is a beautiful display and the aesthetics will get people to look right away. It’s inviting, if not a little bit dull in terms of colour palette, and wonderfully detailed considering the simplistic style to all the items that exist in the world. Sackboy is a great character, and simply pressing a button in any direction on your D-pad changes his mood and watching him get happy, angry and then terrified never seems to get tiring. The levels designed for the single player demonstrate the vast art style that is available, and brings you to the desert, to the forest and into haunted houses seamlessly and all fitting wonderfully into the visual style of the game. All the items scattered throughout the worlds, and the materials available make the game this gorgeous mish-mash of colours, textures and lighting that just makes the game pop off the screen. The music helps to bring you into the world even more, with a great and bouncy soundtrack that will continue to get stuck in your head.

Gameplay is fairly simple, as described above. Very much like the Grimp in PixelJunk Eden, your character can grip and jump. Each level is filled with bubbles that give you points, so you are effectively competing to get the most bubbles in each level, whether played alone or with others. Not all surfaces are able to be grabbed on to, however, adding to the strategy, but the jumping is the real issue. Platformers are very dependent on their jumping mechanics, and LBP‘s greatest flaw is that it just doesn’t seem to get this right. Sackboy’s size and mechanics may fit into the world’s physics, but the fact that you will slide off small platforms, under-shoot and over-shoot constantly makes some of the more testing levels a bit more frustrating. And although the game is effectively 2D, it does have 3 planes within the world that you can jump in and out of, and since the game makes a lot of those in-out decisions for you automatically, you’ll find yourself sailing to the bottom of a pit or off a bridge randomly and annoyingly to your death. Although standard platforming isn’t the only real option for gameplay in the game, it is the major portion of it and having weak mechanics for this is a real let down. It certainly isn’t a fatal flaw, but it’s a flaw nonetheless, and a major gameplay element that comprises 90% of what you’ll be doing while playing.

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