Is Little Big Planet 2 the best game ever made?

My good lady still doesn’t understand what goes on half the time in this game. One minute I’m watching a video about an old lady trying to get a cat off the top shelf of a supermarket shelving unit, the next I’m bouncing around trying to avoid plasma lasers being shot out by a big fat rectangle head with big teeth. I can kind of see where she is coming from – you can normally tell what game you are expecting to play when you buy it. Gran Turismo 5? Yes, I am a driving game. Call of Duty? Yes, I am a shooting game played by thousands of 13 year olds over 18s as certified.

So you fancy a “platform game”, so you buy Little Big Planet 2, expecting nothing more. You couldn’t be far more from the truth.

Little Big Planet 2 is a platformer in its true sense. The single player gives this one away – you spend most of your time walking and jumping your ‘sackboy’ from one end of the screen to the other, defeating enemies and bosses while collecting points with ‘point bubbles’. Eeverything you expect from a platformer. You and up to 4 players can join in on this – there are even 2-4 player specific side missions that you can complete for more prizes. These ‘prizes’ are stickers and objects that you can use throughout the game and through the creation mode – your moon (I’ll get onto this in a moment).

Before you do anything, you can create your own ‘sackboy’ – choose his fabric, his clothes, and his attire and away you go. You can decorate your pod, make it your own. Create your world, make it your own. Create your moon, make it your own. Yes – make everything your own.

The story mode sells the game superbly – it demonstrates a lot of what you can do that you couldn’t do in the first one, the “Creatinator” being the best thing since slice bread (more on this in a bit too!). Not only that, but the story is brilliant – brilliantly put together by the game developers, Media Molecule.

But, until you’ve gone online, you haven’t seen anything yet. Media Molecule advertised this game as “A Platform for Games”, and they are not wrong. Have you got an idea for a game? You can do it with Little Big Planet – racing games, shoot em ups, platformers (obviously), first person (yes, even first person, here’s the proof), anything, and it’s all thanks to the Controlinator – allowing you to turn any object into a controllable object – just as you would press X to accelarate in a driving game, you can do this with a bit of logic and a bit of programming. Your moon is where you get to create your games, so get there and start creating!

So, what do you get with Little Big Planet 2? You get a great story mode, a “simple or as complicated as you want” game creating tool, literally thousands of other games to play, a fun multiplayer for up to 4 players, locally or online, and you get it all for under £40.

Does this make Little Big Planet 2 the best game ever made? I struggle to think of a game that ever gave you so much without being linear. Final Fantasy X gave me 250 hours worth of gameplay, but it was much the same thing throughout. Gran Turismo 5 continues to suck my free time dry with race after race, but again, it’s all driving and modifying your car to get round the track faster. Little Big Planet is different, but it gives you everything you expect from a game, plus more.

Little Big Planet 2 does have its little own ‘developers’ community which is quite segragated from the rest of the Little Big Planet community, but they tend to churn out some of the best material.

But whatever you do, whoever you play with, if you don’t have fun doing it, and if it doesn’t bring a smile on your face everytime you play it, there is something really quite wrong with you.