I love platformers. They are one of my favorite genres in existence. I wouldn't even say that I am terribly demanding of the games and provided the price is right, I will get involved, sometimes at my own peril and dissatisfaction, with a game that I have read or heard nothing about just because of a good trailer. I know this is a dumb idea but it is a mistake I have made many a time during PS store sale.
One thing I don't feel is acceptable in any game is for it to make it to market loaded with game-breaking bugs. This one has a TON of them
I'm a grown up (kind of) but that doesn't mean that I can't enjoy cutesy. The Rayman series is one of my favs of all time and a big part of why I like it so much is specifically because of the silliness. Little Big Planet 3 has this in spades and right from the start it looked like something I was going to enjoy.
You start the game off as "Sackboy," which is something I found amusing right out of the gate. It depends on how old you are and how well you speak English about whether or not this can be considered offensive or not but to me, it is a great name.
The first level is simple enough, you jump to platforms where your timing means that you are going to get more of the whatever the things are that provide you with life and collectibles and you just progress further to the right for the most part as you make your way towards a boss.
Seems pretty standard so far and I really enjoyed the music and art style which is pretty unique and interesting. It isn't very difficult to "stay alive" as you would expect in the beginning levels and I suppose this is pretty standard in all platformers. It gradually gets more and more difficult and the puzzles become a bit more of a head scratcher as time goes by. This is not to say that this is super-difficult or anything, but it isn't always evident what it is that you are supposed to do next.
Then on just the second stage called Stichem Manor, I encountered my first buggy moment.
This is supposed to be a bit spooky and in a sort of cutesy way it is exactly that. The scariest part of it is when you are trying to make a jump from one platform to the next and then you just land in the void well off the screen and no matter how much you run in any direction you just keep on swimming in the darkness. You are stuck and the only way to get back up to the top is to "restart." None of this part of the game is very difficult so it isn't such a big of a deal but the fact that this restart function exists as an option kind of suggests to me that the developers were aware that this mistake existed but just thought it would be too time-consuming to fix it and introducing a "restart" option would be easier than patching it.
This is a well-known bug and is referred to as "purgatory" by the thousands of people that have found it. It's not something that only a few people have discovered, it seems as though almost everyone that plays this game ends up here every now and then.
I also on 2 separate occasions in the very first day of playing the game had a loading screen pop up and it just stays there forevermore.
I've had this happen in other games on the PS4 as well, but not in the first friggin hour of playing the game. At least some of the other games had the decency to crash me out to the "desktop" of the PS4 on a blue screen... this one just hangs forever. I know that it never ends because I actually left my house to go and meet some friends and forgot it was loading, then returned to my house several hours later to see the same animation still going on. The only way out was to go back to the main menu and manually shut down the game. This resulted in me repeating the stage that I had just completed and thankfully this time the load made it the whole way through (great job dev team!)
One the first boss in the game I had no idea what I was doing and had never been to it before. I didn't time the jumps correctly but its arms were just going straight through me. As I uttered "what the deuce?" to myself I suddenly realized that he can't touch me for some reason. I didn't even need to move at all and its arms just went straight through me. Well i guess that is one way to make the first boss a cakewalk. right?
Later in the game I encountered puzzles that after trying everything I could think of I went into the menu to discover that there is actually a built in function called "good grief" that is meant to help you get through sticky situations. Unfortunately, i have never been able to access this and the option is crossed out because I am "unable to access the LBP3 servers because I am not online." I definitely am online and am connected to the PS Network so why isn't that working?
Once again I am not the only person experiencing this as this is a very widespread issue.
For me this game looks like it could be a lot of fun, if it actually worked the way that it was intended to. I'm happy that I only spent a few bucks on it because all of these issues, the frequent freezes and crashes, and the framerate slowdowns (this is a PS3 game... why TF is a PS4 suffering from framerate issues?) I don't think I will continue to play it. It had a lot of potential methinks but these days, I don't have a lot of patience for games being released full of holes.
The reported and confirmed glitches and bugs page is massive and appears to be ever-growing. Since this game was recently put on a 80% price-reduction, I think we can safely guess that the devs over at Sumo Digital aren't going to bother fixing them.
I would say stay away from this game unless you want to be frustrated. Frustration at game difficulty is fine in my book, but frustration over a game being this terribly broken, is unacceptable.