Having never properly played a Mario Style 3D platformer beyond like maybe 20-30 minutes of Super Mario 64, I was basically going in fresh. Therefore having never played this type of game before, meant there was a small learning curve involved. But once I knew what I needed to do, directing Sackboy around the numerous levels and different worlds became easier as I went through the levels. Though I was caught out by the difficulty spikes as levels did become more difficult to navigate and beat with the limited four lives. While lives can be recovered by tokens in the levels, the levels remained difficult. This difficulty can be lessened by toggling on infinite lives. I did this as the levels got more difficult and this made these levels more manageable, though not making them easier but stopped them from become a Dark Souls type slog.
Sackboy does look and performs pretty well even on the base PS4. With the small cut backs on level design which involved removing a few extra bits of level design and running at 720p, Sackboy still looks pretty great. It also sticks to the 60fps target pretty well, though I did encounter small frame rate dips in the later levels and in cut scenes. But beyond these small dips, it hits its target 99% of the time during gameplay.
The story is all about Sackboy trying to stop Vex from taking control of Craftworld. While it is a very loose story, it does allow the game to visit a range of different biomes from icy mountains to Space ports. Sackboy: A Big Adventure contains the traditional Little Big Planet comedy and the level names are nice little puns. The quality of the game is also lifted by the voice acting, as while Sackboy doesn’t suddenly talk in this game, the other characters do. The cast including Dawn French and Richard E Grant and the impressionist Lewis MacLeod, who also had a role in Little Big Planet 3, does stress the quality of this game.
This is a game which should be played no matter the platform as it works and feels really well even on base PS4. It has also worked, to me at least, really well as an introduction to these type of 3D platformers, so I might have to play others in this genre and style of game.