Can Sackboy’s new friends help him for this third installment?
Our favourite fabric friend is back in the all new LittleBigPlanet 3. This time the story is focused in a new world called Bunkum. Sack Boy accidentally releases three evil titans and together with his new playable friends must defeat them and the creator Newton voiced by Hugh Laurie who wants to destroy the creative world.
The level layout has changed, you now enter a type of hub for each chapter, which is kind of a level in itself. In the hub you have to seek out the individual level doors to transport you into a level so you can progress in the story. It can get kind of confusing, but it is a little fun to explore. Also you no longer find bits of costumes in levels, instead in the hubs are gold bubble things littered which you collect. You can then cash them in in each individual hubs store, but of course you’ll have to find the store first.
A refreshing new change to this franchise is the new playable characters and Sack Boy’s new ability: Climbing! He can now climb up metal railings, which offers a new depth to levels. As far as the new characters go, I was a bit sceptical at first as I couldn’t imagine playing as anyone but the adorable Sack Boy but the majority of the new characters have won me over. OddSock is a dog type character who can run faster than Sack Boy and call wall jump. He is really fun to play as and is my favourite of the three new characters. Big Toggle is the next character you unlock, he is a lot heavier than any other character and can weigh down platforms and pressure plates.
He also can transform to his smaller self, Little Toggle. Little Toggle can fit through smaller spaces other players can’t, run fast, jump high and run on water. He is very fun to play as but as the levels are very fast paced it’s hard to constantly switch between them at high speed. My least favourite, sadly, has to be Swoop. The flying bird type character. From the start of the game I was dreading playing as Swoop, he is very hard to control and you have to manoeuvre him through a lot of tight spaces, some with electric sides which kill you on impact. As you can imagine it can get very frustrating. As each character has a special ability there are some parts that need a certain character to unlock. The game reminds me a bit of the Lego games in this instance.
Sack Boy also has some new toys to play with in this installment of the Little Big Planet games. We first saw sack boys weapons/toys in LittleBigPlanet 2. This time he has more. The Pumpinator, blows and sucks air. It can be used to make gears turn or suck objects towards Sack Boy. The Illuminator is a flashlight which will help you in darker levels and also discovers hidden surprises behind some paintings. The Blink Ball is a gun which you can fire at blue panels which are actually portals that will transport you instantly through them when your bullet hits them. The Hook Hat will attach you on to red rails which resemble zip lines and get you to areas you otherwise couldn’t reach.
Lastly there are Boost Boots which essentially let you double jump. In some levels there are power ups in the air which refill your boost meter and let you do an extra jump. These are really fun to play with, the Boost Boots can be a pain to control and it can be annoying when you forget you have the Pumpinator enabled and try and grip an object and end up blowing it away!
Unfortunately while playing this game I encountered a lot of frame rate issues and game breaking glitches. In a certain level when I lost a life the game randomly ended the level and triggered the end rewards. A lot of the time Sack Boy can be very laggy, but hopefully this will be fixed in future patches. But currently, parts of the game are unfortunately unplayable.
Visually the game does look similar to all of the other LittleBigPlanet games. It might be slightly more colourful and the new abilities do change it up a bit. The PS4 version of the game has an improved graphics engine and runs at a full 1080p, while the PS3 version runs at 720p.
Players will be glad to know they can still create their own levels, and what’s more LittleBigPlanet 3 allows players to create 16 playable layers of depth whereas in previous titles player could only create up to 3. As always you collect building items in levels and players can also now extend their build levels to make them longer.
The Verdict
In conclusion I really wanted to like this game as I have all the others. Sadly the bugs and glitches were too much to continue playing and some of the characters too hard to control. I miss the old level layout, the current one with the added hub is too confusing and just isn’t necessary. I never spent much time creating my own levels but to the games credit they seem to have really improved on that front.
