LittleBigPlanet Vita – Review
Let’s start with a personal history lesson. About 15 years ago, when I was still a unexperienced and innocent lad, I often stayed at my grand-parents’s house after school hours. They lived in a small, rural town with hardly anything to do. My solution: gather every possible type of material that wasn’t nailed down and fabricate my own tools and playthings. Most of the time it didn’t turn out so well, I’d put my finger in the devastating path of a hammer (yes, back in the day we used REAL hammers), or my creations would turn out to be nothing more than a pile of crap, covered in bloody nails, both kinds. I lacked creativity. I quit.
Had I pushed on and mastered the art of…hammerin’, maybe I’d have wowed the world with my creations. Maybe it could have been called actual art. Let’s just say, for the sake of my story, that LittleBigPlanet is what my imagination told me I should have been able to manufacture.
Of course, I couldn’t, and the mind-reading bastards at Media Molecule stole my thoughts and added a crazy, walking potato-sack as a mascot before I even noticed. But enough rambling, on with the review.
If you’ve played any of the previous games in the series, you’ll know what to expect. If you haven’t, here’s a small recap: LittleBigPlanet throws you in a fairy tale-platforming-world waiting to be saved by Sackboy, the aforementioned potato-bag with a near endless garderobe and a dozen weird facial expressions. All this returns with the usual flair in this latest PS Vita iteration.
And I do mean everything. As a matter of fact, LittleBigPlanet Vita might be the best of its kind so far. The gameplay and platforming are spot-on, the game still has that magical look and atmosphere that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. There’s just nothing else quite like it. I won’t go into the basic gameplay too much, it’s solid and just watching one of the many trailers, will give you a good idea what it’s all about. Instead I’ll move onto what’s new for this Vita version.
Let’s start with the controls. Ye olde buttons still do what you’d expect them to, e.a. making Sackboy jump, run, grab and use his many gadgets like the grappling hook and rockets. New to the game are touch controls. Tapping the front screen will push certain objects into the background, hitting the back of your handheld will bring them to the front. Missiles can be guided and tracking your finger around the scenery will leave pink sparkles that open up new paths to discover.
Then there are minigames that feel like full fledged smarthphone-timewasters. Yes Tapling, we’re looking at you.
But perhaps the biggest change has taken shape as the all-new level editor. Creating your own levels has always been the heart of LittleBigPlanet. it’s what put the series on the map and it’s what secured its spot in the history books of gaming. Yet even though user made levels number in the millions, actually designing your own world proved much more difficult than many had hoped. Until now. This time it’s ‘just’ a matter of simply dragging the different parts of the scenery around. Sure, you still need a certain amount of creativity and insight to create an actually fun level, but the tools have become more user-friendly.
Expect to be drowned by fan-made content, consisting of mostly Super Mario and Final Fantasy tributes.
Some people will no doubt argue that while LittleBigPlanet sports the charm, it lacks an interesting story. Those people would both be right and miss the point entirely at the same time. The LBP-games have never been about storytelling, Sackboy isn’t exactly the most engaging protagonist. It’s about losing yourself in an absurd world made up of scraps of wood, cloth and anything else you can find in nearly any attic, cellar and garage. It’s about creating whatever you want. It is about fun.
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