Right from the start of the Little Big Planet 2 beta your start off in your pod as the well known sackboy. Everything at first glance seems very similar to the first game but you get all that but expanded versions of it. The story mode consists of a few level and different challenges that you can play with other people if you want. Throughout the levels you will come across arcade style mini-games. These mini-games almost seem like replicas of classic arcade games such as Pacman and Pong with a Little Big Planet spin on them. A lot of these games are user created already so when the full game is released in January of 2011 I can only imagine what users will come up with.
The whole game whether it comes to creating your own level or the controls for instance feel upgraded. The controls feel a lot smoother and easier to do what you want to do. New additions include a jump pad that launches Sackboy into there air as well as horizontal and vertical pads that can lead to some fast paced gameplay. Your grappling hook is picked up usually at the beginning of the level and proves extremely useful. The ‘Createnator’ allows players to fire any object in the game as a weapon by using an emitter that is carried by Sackboy. This emitter can be tweaked to fire at different speeds and different accuracies which blew me away. It can be combined with any object in your Popit menu.
Sackbots are another addition to the game that are really cool as they appear as little robotic sackboys. These Sackbots can be programmed to be friend or foe as well as using the new follow option to have them follow you, which can lead to some challenges as they cannot jump. The most amazing feature when it came to the Sackbots were the fact that you could manipulate their behavioral properties. You can make Sackbots have phobias of certain things, make them zombies, make them more responsive to certain things in the game as well as other things too. It also seemed much easier to create your own content, where as it would take me hours to do a simple thing in the first game seemed to be a lot easier to do in this sequel. All the tools, music creation software, controller button mapping have improved a lot. You can even customize how the planets(Earth, Moon) look. One level I was able to rotate gravity, which was pretty cool.
Media Molecule is very community friendly and not just when it comes to the game itself. Several community members were hired as level creators for Little Big Planet 2. This just adds to the creativity of the game and it seems like your imagination is the only thing holding you back from creating a masterpiece of a level. Whether you want to make puzzle games, a first-person shooter, go-kart racing to a concert with your own custom made music, the list goes on. Little Big Planet 2 seems to have endless possibilities and is a game where you will find more games inside the game. If you liked the first game than this is a must have for you and if you didn’t play the first game enjoy the post and check out some of the videos from the beta, as this will surely be one of the biggest hits in 2011.
