A charming dose of fun.
You play as Sackboy. A little person with a big heart, as he goes from place to place doing his best to help those in need. This help could take form anywhere between helping a director make his movie to returning a dragon egg to it's mother.
Each chapter is broken up into levels, which have their own unique look. Each part of the story takes place in a different area of the world, which inspires the art for each stage. Each level is played on a two plane world of platforming adventure. That is to say, although you're essentially moving on a 2D plane, there is one level of depth allowing you to move one step away from (then back towards) the screen.
You'll be running, jumping, swinging and falling through this colourful land pushing and pulling various objects to solve a variety of switch puzzles. Flying tethered jet packs, and riding a crazy collection of creatures and conveyances also adds to the fun ways to get around. The developers did a great job at keeping the level design mixed up, and throwing in new surprises to keep the game feeling fresh.
The puzzles are usually simple but clever. The action and pacing makes for an experience that is most often light-hearted fun. However, going for the top score, and looking to collect everything there is to collect will keep you coming back for more as you try to up your skills.
Some items you'll be looking to unlock will be new wardrobe items for your Sackperson. This will let you change the skin (or cloth) colour of your character, along with the look of their hair, clothes, footwear and fashion accessories.
The most interesting thing I found to unlock were the bonus levels. These are unlocked by finding hidden items in the story missions, and usually consist of a mini-game (perhaps flinging cows around) or a race against the clock over treacherous terrain. It was in a few of these races where I found lay the biggest challenges in the game.
The story mode is relatively short, and if you're looking to simply make it from start to finish as quickly as possible, skipping the extras, you could likely do it in just 2-3 hours. Of course that's not where the developers intended on having the fun end.
In addition to the enjoyment the bonus levels add, you can also create your own levels. You can then share your levels, or go online and download from the library of levels other users have created. Sadly I didn't find the selection of user levels for the PSP version to be that grand; or at least the selection of levels that earned high ratings.
The controls are fairly tight, with little room for improvement. You can tell that quality level design plays a big role in making the controls work as well as they do. It was rare when playing through the story mode that I wished for a little more refinement with them, but more often this feeling came around when I was playing some of the lesser quality user-made levels.
I appreciated the sound track in the game, which came with fitting music and sound effects. It was all catchy without being tiring and repetitive. The voice-overs for your guide that comes around during any kind of tutorial was well cast and a pleasure to listen to.
Little Big Planet on the PSP is full of creativity, and serves as a great amalgamation of old methods meeting new ideas.