Friday, February 20, 2015

LittleBigPlanet 3 Is Our Reminder That Games Should Be Fun Before All Else


Hey, 2014… What’s your deal? Do you like disappointing us? You know, it wasn’t long ago that it seemed like every past year was the new “Best Year Ever for Gaming,” full of AAA hits and genre-defining titles.

Way to drop the ball, 2014. That was… Man, that was rough.

I'll admit that I enjoyed Assassin's Creed Unity more than the average player, though that had a lot to do with the fact that my copy was one of the few that wasn't infested with glitches and bugs. Far Cry 4 isn't bad, but really it's more of the same. I loved Destiny for like, seven minutes before realizing the amount of grinding and backtracking the game expected from me. Watchdogs? Didn't even even bother with it.

By the time LittleBigPlanet 3 released in November, I just didn’t have it in me to expect anything more than mediocrity. Nonetheless I made the trek up to GameStop on release day to pick up my preordered copy, if only because it came with a Sackboy plushy, and you best believe I wanted my damn plushy. When it came to the actual game, though, my expectations were so low that I didn’t even bother to pop the disc into the console until last week.

Who would’ve thought that I’d be here, halfway through February 2015, making a case for LittleBigPlanet 3 as my game of the year for 2014? Granted, my tempered expectations certainly helped, but make no mistake, this game is really really fun.

I’ve been a big fan of this series from day one, and even before that when Media Molecule’s new creation was the talk of the gaming town. It was just such a novel idea, giving players the toolset to create their own side scrolling levels based on a robust physics engine, and on top of that, including a fun story mode full of levels that were built with those same exact tools that we could use to make our own levels. That’s what was so cool about it: the story mode levels were mostly there to inspire our own creativity, and to show us what the game’s level editor is capable of.

Half a decade later and not that much has changed with the game’s third main entry, but somehow I’m having more fun with LittleBigPlanet than I ever did before. Maybe it’s because I’m just starved for a game that offers pure fun instead of tedious grinding and leveling up, and loot collecting, and cutscenes, and unbalanced difficulty levels. I don’t know. What I do know is that I find myself looking forward to playing LittleBigPlanet 3 when I get home from work every day, and it’s been too long since I’ve had that feeling.

What I specifically love about this game, along with the charming aesthetic, is the surprising amount of variety from level to level. The developers clearly had a ton of great ideas, so many in fact that every level seems to have its own schtick, its own gimmick. LittleBigPlanet 3 features three new characters with their own abilities (I want an Oddsock plushy I want it so bad), and this addition alone creates so many new gameplay devices that you gotta wonder how many the developer had to leave on the cutting room floor.

In addition to the story mode levels, LBP 3 finally includes a game mode that I’ve been pining for since the first title came out. The developers gave us all these tools to use for building our own levels, but we didn’t actually get to use those tools while we played through the story mode itself. In other words there was an edit mode and a play mode, and they were kept separate. Finally, with this third iteration in the series the developers combined the two and built a sort of tutorial out of it. I always thought it’d be cool if, in the middle of a level, you had to build your own car or rocket, or some other contraption in order to progress. I haven’t played many of these levels yet, but I can’t wait to see what they have in store.

I’m also surprised to find that I like the three new playable characters, because when this was first announced it sounded like nothing but a cheap gimmick, a way to make us feel like we were getting something new and fresh. As it turns out, we are getting something new and fresh! Oddsock, Swoop and Toggle don’t revolutionize the experience, but they do add a new dimension to the gameplay and they’re all fun to control.

If only this game came out when I was younger and had more time to play around with the level creator... Because really, that’s the only hang up right there: building levels is time consuming. I have all kinds of ideas and I even built a couple of short levels in the first LittleBigPlanet, but I really don’t have the time anymore to invest into turning those ideas into a reality. Most of my time in Create Mode so far has been spent by just playing around with the physics and the various tools rather than building anything worthy of posting so that other people can play it. There are just too many games out there to play, and not enough time to comprehensively explore them all inside and out.

Still, if you can find the time and you feel like you’ve been burned by a lot of the more “mature” AAA titles that were released in the past twelve months, go ahead and give LBP a try. It’s also a great game to play with any family members or girlfriends/boyfriends who don’t count themselves as gamers. There’s something for everyone to enjoy with this one.


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