Little Big Planet 3 is the first instalment in the franchise that broke away from Media Molecule and was developed by Sumo Digital. With a history of games like Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing and Forza Horizon 2, this should have been a home run for the studio, what transpired was an albeit visual feast, yet so full of game breaking bugs that I still cannot to this day finish the main story, not due to the fact that it is difficult, but because after several play throughs, delete, re-download, delete save file, play all over again, my game copy still can’t unlock that final act to finish the main story.
LBP3 is the first game to introduce new heroes apart form Sackboy. You can unlock Toggle, Oddsock and Swoop, three gladiators who can help restore Bunkum from Newton who wants to squash all creativity in the land. Sound familiar? That’s because it is! The story is a blind re-hash of the the last game, with three extra characters added in for a point of different (Please note you cannot willingly switch to these characters during the game, you have to access certain pads to do it. Really Sumo Digital? REALLY!? ?!)
So you can’t play the game single player, so what does work? Online and community play is up and running with no issues. You can easily slide in and out of the user created levels, and there is no shortage of them! There are millions of levels for you to choose from, and every level made in the previous two games are cross compatible. The tutorials and level creator are much more refined and with the obvious leap forward in system capabilities, this is clearly reflected in this functionality of the game.
Any DLC and costume packs you have bought for any of the LBP games can be downloaded and added to your PSN account (thank GOD!) If you need help with this you can access it in the settings menu and download past content.
Visually the game is beautiful, it is a feast of colour and fluidity incorporating movement with the new DualShock 4 controller that is a noticeable improvement on the last instalments and probably the only thing that is a massive leap forward for this game.
BUT despite all these things you cannot escape from the fact that the game is essentially broken, you can’t actually finish the campaign, reports of Sackperson being elevated and unable to move have come from some friends and other game breaking bugs have made confirmed that Sony wanted this title rushed out for a christmas release to sell consoles and numbers, and in the end it has backfired. We are now at the end of January and instead of apologies and a patch, we are getting paid costume DLC and no info of a fix. It is because of this that I have to give this game such a low score and actually warn you against spending your money on it.
Sumo Digital have completely ruined this instalment in the franchise and will hopefully be picked up another developer that can deliver a working game on time and update their customers as to when it will be fixed if there is any issues.
Little Big Planet 3 is now broken on the PS3 and PS3 exclusively.
Review by Alaisdair Dewar
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