Game Reviews

Little Big Planet – A bit more…

Still playing Little Big Planet, or more aptly, now I’m building levels. I’m experimenting with building some child-friendly levels — simpler things that require less coordination, hopefully something my three year old might be able to play a bit more easily.

I’m impressed with the building tools. I am a lot more familiar with structured toolsets, such as Neverwinter Nights, and I thought I would hate the visual/embedded building tools of Little Big Planet, but I found I got used to them quite quickly. Flying around the level as sackboy, manipulating objects, copying/pasting.. all of it is quite simple, even with a console controller.

It is easy to build geometry for your level, and the other day I found out how to create creatures and that’s pretty cool too. Had a lot of fun trying to build a puppy with my son — and that’s another great aspect, the building of a level is as fun as playing a level. Especially when you do silly things like build a floating castle, but forget to tether it… good bye castle!

At times it is frustrating that you have to “earn” building tools, by watching videos, doing tutorials, or collecting pieces in-game, but  I suspect if all the building tools were thrown at the user all at once, it would be too chaotic, too confusing.

All in all Little Big Planet is definitely my favorite game of 2008.

Former lead designer at BioWare (Dragon Age: Origins, Neverwinter Nights). Creator of Raiders of the Serpent Sea.

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