I decided to give Sackboy: A Big Adventure a try today. I bought it last year and never started it (though, the same could be said for 70% of my library). I decided to just drop Black Flag because i couldn't get the DLC to show up. So i this is what i picked to play next.
Little Big Planet 2 was one of my favorite games growing up, so i was excited to play this. It's definitely not what i was expecting from something with Sackboy in it, but i think my expectations were unfair because i was expecting something like Little Big Planet. It's similar in many ways, but i would say it's much closer to Mario 3D Land instead of Little Big Planet.
After getting over my expectations i really found myself enjoying it. I do wish the Story was a bit more involved in the Levels like they were in Little Big Planet (after the intro i don't think i got any plot exposition for it until six levels in), but they are really well crafted and it has some of the same mechanics that LBP does (i mourn the Level Maker though).
The music is really good too. Though i feel like it feels very out of place and abstract if that makes any sense (though this could very well be my Nostalgia for Pemberton and the other composer's works), it's very well made and i enjoyed the pieces i heard in the first world i played, such as the Yeti one.
The Gameplay is really well made too, there was this puzzle in one of them i really enjoyed where you walked around on this big Screen Like thing. It was a really cool idea. The also have a whole level the utilizes the Rolling mechanic which i feel like is a clever way to get players to adjust to it.
The game also sees the Customization return. I had some free things that i ended up using to customize my character and i bought some cat eyes. I ended up with this thing:
Yeah, I get that the devs probably don't want to rehash the same level editor mechanics ad-naseum so instead they made the far more complex/in-depth Dreams, but I think there's still value in simpler creation tools. I'm sad they moved away from LBP.
Simpler tools lower the bar for entry and can make creating things easier. For LBP it also enforced a cohesive art style, and unless the creator was insane it enforced a specific set of game mechanics.
With Dreams you have no idea what you're in for, and there's countless people taking time poorly reinventing the wheel for basic gameplay functionality. You can't just go and use a highly polished "platformer mechanics" pack created and tested by a professional team like you got with LBP or more recently (and far more restricted) with Mario Maker. Every "starter kit" is going to have differing levels of amatuer jank.
It's a great "intro to game development" tool, but I personally think it's lacking in the "play high quality user created content" realm because there's less quality content as a result of the complexity.
I just want to say there is hope for an LBP style game on PC.
There is no release date, but Restitched is a promising looking game inspired by LBP.
Just wanted to let more people know about it.
Damn. I completely forgot Media Molecule did Dreams. I think Sumo Digital (the same studio that made LBP3) did Sackboy. Part of me wonders if they excluded the level editor to avoid seeming like this was meant to be a direct successor to LBP