Dom Robinson reviews

Distributed by
Sony

Price: £24.99 Players: 1 Widescreen: Yes Vote and comment on this game: View Comments When I first heard about Little Big Planet, on the PS3, it didn't sound massively appealing to me - the sort of thing that would appeal to the Wii generation, just moving a little character about a user-generated landscape and not much else... and then I played it on the PSP and was instantly captured by its charm. You control Sackboy, a stuffed toy-like creature who can be controlled to run along the fairly linear path of each platform level, jumping across basic gaps in the level structure and manipulating construction pieces to allow you to pass over lakes of fire, go on a Down Under walkabout or try and escaping from a dragon. It's never scary, but it's always entirely captivating, and it's so damn cute! It certainly helps that the voiceover comes courtesy of Stephen Fry, which is similar to his style in voicing the book in the 2005 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film.

Little Big Planet Level 1: Down Under: Part 3: Gift of the Grab Sony's mantra is that with this title you can "explore, create and share", so as well as running round the levels and trying to get from A to C while solving puzzle B, you can make your own levels and then go online to upload them for others to play, or download those made by those other users - or "creator curators" - and check those out. One aspect this title doesn't have, which was in the PS3 original, is the multiplayer where up to four of you can take part in a particular level. The PS3 version also had proper 3D elements such that you could put stickers and uploaded pictures all over an item, whereas here it's basically 2D with some slight depth, so you can only put just the stickers on the face of items. In addition, various random observations are as follows: You can customise your character to quite a large degree, but I think I prefer the original outfit. The others look like S&M torture outfits. When on the move, this game is perfect for a bit of handheld fun (oo-er, missus!) At the start, you are told that every day is International Sticker Day, hence why you can put stickers up all over the place. However, unless it's absolutely strictly an essential part of the game to get on, you get a bit bored with it. It's mostly a 2D game, albeit with a bit of screen depth so it's slightly 3D. You can connect to 'My Pod' where you can go online and see the 'My News' section and the description contains a couple of HTML tags that haven't been input properly so show up in the text. There are some mini-games but they're not as good as the game proper and are rather frustrating, especially since when you fail you can't instantly restart, you have to wait for the 'score' to appear which takes forever. There's one major downside in that the level's loading times can be incredibly long. Accessing the menu is a simple and straight-forward affair. Just press the square, then select with the analogue stick and press the action button (X) to choose one. It's best summed up by just watching the video clips, though, and that way you'll see just how wonderful it is. In this review, I've uploaded a number of clips which are as follows: Little Big Planet Level 1: Down Under: Part 1: Intro Little Big Planet Level 1: Down Under: Part 2: Walkabout Little Big Planet Level 1: Down Under: Part 3: Gift of the Grab Little Big Planet Level 1: Down Under: Part 4: Wave Goodbye Little Big Planet Level 1: Down Under: Part 5: Digeridoo Digeridon't... Visit my DVDfeverGames Youtube channel.

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2009.