Little Big Planet 3 arrived late last year, and is the third instalment in Sumo Digital’s super fun and silly trilogy. The Little Big Planet franchise is known for being fun, cute and particularly creative. The games are all about promoting creativity. The playable characters are “Sackboys”, which are essentially little sack puppets that you can dress up however you like.
In terms of mechanics, this game improves on its predecessors because it just builds on what it already had in the first game. You have new and different ways of playing other than just running through a level and being able to grab things with your little sock hand. The second instalment paved the way for this with the grappling hook (which helps you zip from place to place) and the Grabinator (which allows you to pick up heavy objects). These tools made for more versatility in how you could play, and how the levels were constructed.
Little Big Planet 3 builds on this further, providing you with a set of six different tools to use. You’ve got the blink ball (which allows you to use portals), the luminator (essentially a headlamp), the rail hook (which allows you to attach to and slide along rails), as well as a few other neat tricks. These tools are revealed as you play the game and pass different stages. Little Big Planet 3 thrives in this territory. It gives you this diverse set of tools while offering genuinely fun tutorials, and then lets you have at it for the rest of the game.
Little Big Planet 3 introduces three new characters called Toggle, Odd Sock and Swoop. Toggle can switch between big and small forms, Odd Sock is a quadruped that can run very fast and jump up walls, while Swoop can fly about and lift objects around. At various stages in the game, you are given access to these characters, which have levels specifically designed for their use, and eventually you can combine characters.
The levels are all different and fresh. This game builds on the previous two to make something equally fun, but new enough to keep it interesting. My only qualm is with some experimental levels that are a bit of a headache to run through. One level comes to mind where it’s from a bird’s-eye perspective. It was annoying to get the hang of, and was a genuine relief to complete — but this is a small price to pay for what is an extremely entertaining game to play.
The voice acting, as always in these games, is top-notch. Stephen Fry is lovely to listen to while running through levels and learning new aspects of the game. Another addition to Little Big Planet 3 is Hugh Laurie. He voices the main villain of the game, Newton, who wants to harness the creativity of Bunkum, but is overwhelmed by it. Laurie is, of course, a perfect villain. Aside from those two big names, all the other voice acting is great. In previous games, they merely had characters talk in a sort of gibberish and have speech bubbles come up to clarify what was being said. This time around, they actually speak to you. Each level you go to borrows from a culture — one level is covered in snow and the main character from that level speaks in a quirky Russian accent.
Little Big Planet 3 doesn’t have a huge amount of solo replay, but it has a massive content creation mode to make up for this. You can create your own intricate levels using a huge library of objects, tools, music and more. Thousands of playable levels are accessible through the online community where you can post your own custom levels and play those made by other players. This feature goes a long way towards bridging any missed opportunities in the story mode, which are fairly few and far between.
Little Big Planet 3 is an exciting step up from its predecessors in almost every way. It feels familiar but improved, and it is always refreshing to play a game that focuses on fun rather than spectacle.