LittleBigPlanet
I’ve been playing the beta few a few days and so far it’s pretty fun. There are some cool levels out there, some crap ones and many in-between. The controls for creating things is a bit of an arse sometimes. The specific problem I keep having is that when I create something in front of something else, it’s very hard to get at the object at the back layer. Another annoying thing is that the capture object and object selection tools sometimes get confused and decide that nearly the entire level is a single object, which even crashed the game for me once.
It is beta though.
Issues aside the game really is quite fun, though I can’t really say why. It’s essentially a stylised 2D physics sandbox. They style of it is part of it’s charm. Because of it’s soft, natural, playful style as a creator you don’t feel compelled to make everything perfect, you can just create things and not worry about having perfectly straight edges or aligned textures. The rough, tacked-together feel of the whole visual style of the game frees you up to actually focus on doing fun things rather than struggling to make the perfectly shaped and textured object.
Multi-player is fun too, and it’s quite easy to construct levels in such a way that you need multiple players to complete it. Running around solving puzzles together and/or battling each other to collect the most points works surprisingly well, especially in well crafted levels.
Currently, I’m crafting a single level. Despite what I said above, I’m still trying to get everything perfect. However, it’s more to do with game-play elements now than fiddling with brushes and textures. Hopefully I’ll finish it before the beta ends. I’m also stuck on the story levels. I’ve completed them all but I’ll be damned if I can complete them all to 100% – I have no idea where the other collectables could be and there seems to be no indication at all in the levels as to where they may be hidden. So I’m stuck creating with the few objects I have managed to collect, both online from other people and in single player.
All in all, I’m looking forwards to playing the full game. I’m not much of a hardcore gamer per se, so something nice and casually fun like this appeals to me.