Saturday, 10 September 2011

Videogame review: Little Big Planet 2


Sackboy goes to battle a new enemy.
Little Big Planet pushes the boundaries of what a game is. At his heart lies an incredibly sophisticated and flexible suite of creation tools with whom it’s possible to create entirely new games. With Little Big Planet 1 we were limited to platform levels but with this new title it’s possible to create virtually anything. If you don’t believe watch you a user recreated the historical grandfather of the FPS genre Wolfenstein during the beta.

Alas not everybody is gifted with such creativity and so we normal human being are limited to the play aspect of the game and here sadly they blundered a little bit.
See where the first one had an incredibly fascinating single player campaign with amazing backdrop and near perfect game play which introduced us seamlessly to Little Big Planet world this one had to introduce us to the extreme flexibility of the new editor. To do so a new tool and a new way of playing are introduced every couple of levels. There are hooks, guns, ships, all kind of stuff and therefore the play experience is fragmented and disjointed. The game often transform into a side scrolling shoot’em up.
Also many of these new features are kinda terrible to use. There is an awful mechanical rabbit that is very fiddly to control and also the hook is implemented in a very complicated way.
The amazing theatratical backdrops are ditched in favor of a more realistic approach and generally speaking the game is much less poetic.
Of course there are exceptions, mainly the green hippie level where all the old creators make cameo appearances as asylum inmates, but in the end it all felt fairly standard, not bad per se but neither really good.
Let’s hope that there are many hidden gems in the user created levels because on the strength of the single player experience I wouldn’t recommend this game.

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