LittleBigPlanet (PlayStation Vita)

LittleBigPlanet was a surprise hit for the PlayStation 3?. It was a deceptively cute platformer that combined accessible, friendly design with some of the most powerful editing tools offered in a retail game. The result was not only a bestselling game, but a series that spawned a second PS3 game, a PSP game, a lot of premium downloadable content, and several huge libraries of user-generated content. LittleBigPlanet now hits Sony's newest handheld with LittleBigPlanet? for the PS Vita?, a $39.99 game that offers the same great gameplay as the original with even more powerful editing tools, making it even more full of potential and open to a ton of levels and games built with it. It's the best version of LittleBigPlanet to date, and one of the best games currently on the PS Vita.

The Same Game
If you've played LittleBigPlanet before, you've played this game. The mechanics are basically identical to both PS3 versions and the PSP version of LittleBigPlanet. You play a cute "Sackboy" who runs around large, side-scrolling levels based on various themes, solving puzzles on the way to the end of each level.

As with the other versions of LittleBigPlanet, the single-player campaign is relatively short (it will take players between four and six hours) and serves as little more than a training ground and demonstration area to show what the engine can do. You can earn various items by exploring each level, which can easily add another hour or two to your game time, and some puzzles require additional players to help you out. The locations are varied in theme, and let you unlock the components of each theme to use in your own creations. The single-player campaign shows you what can be done with all these things you unlock, but it's only the tip of the iceberg.

Stephen Fry returns as gaming's most charming narrator, and he walks you through the single-player levels and creation tools with his friendly, reassuring voice. It fits with the game itself, which is so bubbly and warm it'll make you want to light a cake on fire.

Building a World
The creation tools and online aspect of LittleBigPlanet is the biggest part of the game. You can build your own levels with your own rules and share them online. You can also play with friends online to beat those levels, show them off, or unlock additional items with which to build those levels by getting help for the single player levels.

The creation tools are powerful and daunting, with tons of switches, joints, sensors, connectors, and even logic gates? to make every object in your level do exactly what you want them to. Each object can also be of your creation, using a variety of different shapes, decorations, and stickers. The tools are so powerful, you can even completely change the rules of the game and turn the platforming game into an arcade, racing, or puzzle game of your own design. The single-player campaign includes an Arcade with five games that demonstrate what you can do with the engine, and it's impressive to see just how flexible LittleBigPlanet can be with enough work.

There's a lot of power in the game's editor, and there's a lot to learn to use that power. LittleBigPlanet comes with 67 tutorials, all of which a narrated by Stephen Fry, and you'll have to pay attention to all of them to take full advantage of what the editor can do. You can create a simple platform level in just a few minutes, but a complex menagerie of tricks and hacks can take hours to learn and hours more to build. These tools are available to all players, which means you can enjoy the fruits of community creativity without having to learn the tools yourself.

Online Content
Everything you create in LittleBigPlanet will be uploaded to LBP.me, which already hosts PS3 LittleBigPlanet content. You can't play PS3 levels on the PS Vita version of the game, and at the time of this writing I could not load PS Vita levels from the site, but content for the PS Vita version should be browsable and queueable for fast-loading in the game on LBP.me after the game's release. You can also import all the DLC costumes you had from the PS3 versions of LittleBigPlanet and LittleBigPlanet 2, b ut that feature wasn't enabled at the time of this writing.

The PS Vita's touch screen and rear touch panel add some useful cursor and camera controls to the creation tools, and add a new dimension to the game's own controls. You can use your finger to move certain platforms, push them in and out of the background, and manipulate different things in levels. When making levels, you can use the touch screen to control the cursor and place objects, and multitouch controls let you rotate and resize them, though not with as much precision as the analog sticks.

This is easily the best version of LittleBigPlanet yet, with more creation tools than ever. It looks just as good as it did on the PS3, and the extensive options promise no end of levels and even full games from the community. It doesn't revolutionize LittleBigPlanet, but it refines and adds enough that it's a satisfying sequel on a handheld system. It gets our Editors' Choice for PS Vita games.

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