'LittleBigPlanet 2' is Pure Fun

“LittleBigPlanet 2” may be the closest thing to pure, distilled joy that you will ever experience in your sad, boring, little life.

In short, if you had a good time playing the original, you’ll have a better time playing this one. If you’re new to “LittleBigPlanet,” read on and by the end, you’ll know what’s up.

“LittleBigPlanet 2” is, at its core, a platforming game, meaning you’ll be jumping on a lot of stuff, whether it’s platforms or bad guys.

You play as a cute little “sackboy” as he fights back against the Negativitron, a malevolent vacuum cleaner. Sound ridiculous? Good.

It’s important to note that the game is for up to four players at once. You might be worried that you might lose your sackboy on the screen, but the developer, Media Molecule, found their own way to combat this threat: you can decorate your sackboy however you want, provided you grabbed the right decorations in the single-player game.

By the end, I was dressed like Kanye West saving the world with my two friends, a medieval knight and James Dean. It was incredible.

To call “LBP2” just a platformer, though, would be doing it a great injustice. In the single-player campaign alone there are sections that range from flying on bumblebees that shoot lasers to running from a giant flaming mechanical chicken.

The art design follows suit in the craziness. Most of the time, platformers have their fire level, water level, jungle level, etc. The first game was kind of like that. In stark contrast, one of the worlds here is a neo-communist robot factory. Let that sink in for a second.

But the single-player is just the tip of the iceberg. Sure, you can create really good levels on par with the levels the developers made for single player, but there are just about an infinite amount of other things you could create.

To cite two examples, people have almost perfectly recreated a dungeon from the original “Legend of Zelda” and sections from “Wolfenstein 3D,” one of the original first-person shooter games.

I can’t finish this review without at least mentioning the large amount of licensed music used in this game. All of it fits perfectly, and takes the experience from A to AAA grade.

“LittleBigPlanet 2” improves on the original in just about every way and ups the ante for user created content in console games.
It’s pure, distilled fun stamped onto a disc. If you don’t like it, then you simply don’t like being happy.

[Photo courtesy of gamervision.com]