LittleBigPlanet: Hands On

Apart from the Xbox Live Arcade title Braid, there are very few platform games that are capable of holding my attention these days. Sort of like a hyperactive kid being fed sugar sachets from McDonalds and then told to sit down and solve a quadratic equation. However, Little Big Planet was the exact opposite and proved to be almost impossible to put down. Constantly tempting you to play level after level… it was like a strip-tease. You have to see more and you’re willing to do anything to get there.

The main reason for this is that Little Big Planet is not your average platformer. It’s essentially a giant sand-box, filled with objects and tools for you to play around with and do as you please. The world of Little Big Planet, despite looking quirky, is rooted in real life, featuring physics and rules that adhere to our own world. By interacting with objects like springs, string, balls, levers, wheels and so forth you can proceed through a variety of obstacles to reach the end of the level. Like a platform game, most levels scroll from left to right, but Little Big Planet is certainly not 2d. You can move away or towards the camera on many platforms, giving you a greater sense of movement to get past obstacles. Occasionally, and depending on the layout of the game, the angle of the camera shifts smoothly too giving you a better sense of depth.

By now most people should be familiar with Sackboy and Sackgirl. These little hacky-sacks crossed with voodoo dolls are your playable characters in Little Big Planet. Despite their simplistic appearance, these sackpeople are incredibly detailed from their animations through to the customisation aspects. In fact it is probably safe to say that we spent more time dressing up and playing with our sackpeople than we did actually playing the game. There are thousands of combinations, so you can have zebra heads, Elton John glasses, cheerleader outfits, tuxedos, googly eyes, Mexican wrestler face-paint, camouflage, cowboy hats, capes, bridal gowns… the list goes on and on and the results are often hilarious. It’s like a primary school stage production where the kids have been told to dress however they want with an unlimited wardrobe. If you want to be a transsexual ballerina with a meaty moustache, big black boots and antlers sticking out of your head, the choice is all yours.

This is compounded by the fact that you can control the facial expressions, arms and body of your sackpeople too. The D-Pad gives you an array of different emotions ranging from happy or sad through to scared and angry. Each facial expression has three extremes and these seem to change depending on your character's appearance as well. Players can then control the arms by holding down the left and right trigger (one for each arm) and use the two analogue sticks to move them around. We even found out (completely by accident) that you can actually whack your team-mates around if you are wielding an object in your hand, like a frying pan for instance. This was hours of fun on its own. The body of your Sackboy or Sackgirl can be twisted and bent by tilting your controller thanks to the Six-axis motion sensors and the end result is a complex, easy to pick-up way of expressing yourself on the fly. When playing multiplayer (Little Big Planet can take up to four players, both local and online) you can easily inform your fellow sackmate to grab an object, or that you are not happy with being left behind. Not to mention that it all looks pretty damn funny having all four sackpeople gestulating wildly with over exaggerated facials in random costumes. Little Big Planet oozes cute, but it never seemed overly sickening.

Once you have a costume made for your sackperson you can save it in your collection and you can change your appearance at any point in the game too. Pressing the square button displays a menu known as a “Pop-It” which gives you access to your wardrobe and also to your sticker collection. Like a cool kid from the 80’s, you collect stickers throughout the game and these go into your hand-dandy sticker album. At any point you can bust these stickers out and plaster them all over the level – even onto the face of your fellow sackpeople! Although mainly for amusement, there are a few elements of puzzle-solving with stickers too, usually requiring you to place the correct shaped sticker onto an object by resizing it or rotating it.

There is little question that Little Big Planet is going to be huge when it gets released on the 24th October. It will cater to both casual gamers, first-time players and even to some of the serious gamers out there who want a refreshing break from the usual. Some people may be concerned that a game that once looked like a downloadable title is now retailing for the full price on disc – but the amount of playability and customisation is sure to silence the disbelievers. We haven’t even mentioned the level editor yet – which basically opens up a whole online community that can build and share their creations with the world. One chap, who obviously has way too much time on his hands recently created a working calculator, capable of doing simple addition and subtraction! Using only strings, cogs and levers you can imagine how long this must have taken him – but the point is that the possibilities are limitless in Little Big Planet. Get ready to let your imagination run loose this month.