Awesome if you’re a casual, downright terrible if you’re a completionist
User Rating: 5 | Sackboy: A Big Adventure PS5
If you’re interested in Sackboy because you want a fun couch co-op game, a kid friendly title on the PS5, or just a decent platformer to zip through by yourself, this game will be great for you. If you’re a trophy hunter or completionist, I can’t stress enough how much you should avoid this title. The Little Big Planet franchise is incredible. I’d give LBP 1-3 straight 9’s across the board, with the first game almost hitting that perfect mark if you factor the timeframe it was released in, and the untrodden ground it paved. The games are charming, adorable, fun, engaging, and did I mention fun? The appeal of LBP was never to overcome a challenge, it was to have a blast exploring a beautiful imaginative environment. Unfortunately Sackboy has all of the bells and whistles of a LBP title, with absolutely none of the solid mechanics. The reason for this is that when zipping through Sackboy with a couple of friends, not caring about getting all of the collectibles and acing the levels, there really aren’t too many issues. However, you will notice every single glaring flaw if you try to ace the levels, get every collectible, and worst of all, complete every trial. There are mechanics in Sackboy that are downright awful. How a platformer in this franchise that came out a dozen years prior managed to avoid these pit falls is reminiscent of how spawns in CoD titles are awful present day when they never had issues in 2007. To name a few of these - Bubble level jumping rarely ever works, and I found myself constantly jumping straight up in the air when intending to jump diagonally to another bubble. This resulted in countless deaths that had me scratching my head at times, and wanting to throw my console out of a window in others. Sponge grabbing levels, where you have to simultaneously hold onto a rotating sponge, aim in a specific direction, and jump to another are unbearable. More often than not my character would let go of the sponge indiscriminately, drop off for no good reason, or bounce off of the next sponge causing me to plummet to my death. Collision is all over the place. Sometimes you take a slight bump, other times you’re flung off of a platform for no discernible reason. Even something as simple as collecting pick-up bubbles is a mess. Unlike previous games in the franchise, these now react as if they’re solid orbs that occasionally you might pop, and other times you might knock completely off of the edge. There’s no rhyme or reason to this. There are plenty of other janky mechanics that my mind has repressed out of sheer rage. All of these little hang ups aren’t terrible If you’re just trying to beat the game or play with friends, but if the difference between acing a level (no deaths) is a single jump that goes horribly wrong for no reason, or you’re just shy of the top score needed for that pesky final collectible and your character happens to just jettison all of the orbs off the side of a cliff for NO DAMN REASON, it can get very frustrating. Overall my biggest issue with this game is that it’s just not as fun as other titles in the franchise. It’s not as creative. It’s not as charming. It’s not as Little Big Planet as it should be. I wanted desperately to love this game and I found myself uninstalling it before completing it.
