LittleBigPlanet Hands-On

By Liam O'Connor

In most video games, you can either play with someone, or against someone. LittleBigPlanet is perhaps the first mainstream game that allows you to both play with and against someone at the same time.

Supporting up to four players simultaneously, LittleBigPlanet will see you battling it out to get the number one ranking in each level, yet at the same time it will force players into situations where they must all cooperate in order to finish the level.

I was recently given some hands-on time with LittleBigPlanet at a recent PlayStation event in Auckland. Sitting down, the supremely friendly Sony rep that was helping people play the game was very keen to stress the customisation features of LittleBigPlanet.

For those that have been living under a rock, LittleBigPlanet allows you to mess with basically everything in the game. You can customise every detail of your character, right down to their goofy facial expressions. I chose to make some psychotic zombie bunny with a toothless grin that would make Worzel Gummidge blush.

You can also interact with and customise the various environments. You could simply place stickers on levels or you could build your own in the level editor and share them on the Internet. You’re only limited by your imagination – the power is yours!

This is all fantastic stuff, but it’s really the cherry on top. The cooperative-competitive gameplay is what really helps LittleBigPlanet separate itself as a potential killer app for the PS3. Throughout the various levels there will be tokens of various sorts – the standard coin of the realm for a platform game – that can be collected. The player that collects the most wins. Simple, right?

Not so – for certain areas of the game will force you and your fellow players to work together to overcome obstacles in your path. For example, one area required us to fly around in little jetpacks and carry shells up to a lever. Once the lever had been sufficiently weighed down, the door to the next part of the level would open. The problem turned out to be that all the shells that were small enough to be carried individually were of insufficient weight.

The consequence of this was that we all had to work together to lift a giant shell up onto the lever. It was a teeth-grinding moment that required everyone to bury the hatchet and work together. The idea reminds me of when Wolverine was forced to team with the other X-Men to defeat the Juggernaut. Here is a man who desperately feels the desire to work alone, yet was forced into a situation where he had no choice but to cooperate with his peers.

It’s ingenious stuff, especially when you realise that the potential for backstabbing chaos is second only to Risk. Once through the gate, a well timed backslap from yours truly sent one of my fellow players to the ground and I was able to run ahead and grab all the tokens while laughing like the Joker on nitrous oxide. I went from cooperating to competing in approximately five seconds – such is the charm of LittleBigPlanet.

Dying in LittleBigPlanet has consequences. Sure, when you die you can always come back at the next warp pipe thing. But when you’re dead, you can’t collect tokens. And you do want to win, don’t you? Players are also able to rush ahead and leave everyone off-screen to die if they can’t catch up in a time limit. This allows you to be the soul token collector until the next warp pipe. The catch? You might come up against an obstacle that you can’t solve without other people. It’s LittleBigPlanet’s Catch 22: you want to beat these people, yet at the same time you need them. Forced alliances are the best kind.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a LittleBigPlanet hands-on without talking about how you can interact with the world. Yes, you can pull down boulders so you can jump to the next level. Yes, you can push skateboards and then jump on them, launching yourself into the air. Yes, you can roll giant soccer balls against a wall and then stop them from rolling by pushing blocks against them, effectively creating platforms. It’s all very intuitive, but at the same time it all appears to be heavily scripted. The fun comes not from interacting with the world, but interacting with other players in this world.

And yes, it all looks gorgeous and it’s incredibly cute.

There’s lots to like about LittleBigPlanet, but it's the approach to multiplayer that sets it apart. Supporting both online and local multiplayer, the only way LittleBigPlanet could be anything but fun is if you are a Johnny No-Mates without an internet connection. Online play on the PSN is free, after all.

No firm date for LittleBigPlanet was available, although I was told “this year”. There’s definitely some polishing to be done, but nothing that could stop LittleBigPlanet from being the killer app for Christmas. Keep it locked to NZGamer for a full review in the future.

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