LittleBigPlanet has been billed as the must have exclusive the Playstaion 3 has been waiting for and has received universal acclaim for its artful new direction. But as Media Molecule's title soaks up the plaudits and its greatness is inaugurated by the world’s gaming press quicker than Barack Obama’s presidential victory, there are many legitimate issues that remain ignored about LittleBigPlanet’s shortcomings.
For the uninitiated, this is essentially a 2d platformer, with its real appeal in its peerless level editor; encouraging the player to become the creator to design and customize their very own vision of how a level can look and play. The player can then upload these levels on to the community network for other players to download, effectively offering infinite potential. Great in theory. But here’s the problems that have been clearly overlooked. For a start, there might as well not be a single player mode in LittleBigPlanet. When someone spends £40 on a new game they at the very least should be entitled to expect a compelling in-depth single player campaign. That should always be the number one priority for a developer. Its mediocre at best, full of glitches and control issues that even the game’s creators have acknowledged and intend to rectify with a downloadable patch. Game developers seem to get away with releasing unfinished games at full price these days by promising they’ll release a patch at a later date, but that's not good enough. It's an inherit problem from PC gaming and it appears that consoles are falling into the same trap.
A lot of people would argue that the single-player mode is an irrelevance, merely acting as a tool to collect the necessary items so you can go off on your own to create your own masterpiece. But unless you want your level to be cast into the sea of sheer ugliness you will have to invest a lot of time into creating something that at least resembles anything enticing enough for others to have a real go at.
Don’t get me wrong – as a model for user generated content that encourages creativeness, LittleBigPlanet is so far ahead of anything else out there. If that's want you want, this is definately for you. But what’s wrong with making a great one-player game, without the bugs, and leaving you the player to make whatever use of the level editor as you see fit? Originality should be cherished in an industry hell-bent on ripping each other off, saturated with a deluge of boring greyathon shooters. Unfortunately the gaming media feel the need to protect the likes of LittleBigPlanet and are quite willing to excuse it’s problems because it sets out to do things differently. Ultimately games should be judged on their own merit and while LittleBigPlanet reaps in 10/10 review all over the place, the fact remains that the game is virtually inaccessible for a lot of people. Media Molecule have successfully pulled the wool over the games media’s eyes, and for that alone, they deserve a perfect score.
