I’m probably going to get some stick for what I’m about to write but I really started to hate LBP the more I played of it.

First off, I actually loved the BETA. I thought it was great fun, Sackboy was a great character and I had a lot of fun playing it. Then I decided to stop because I didn’t want to get the game and find that the experience would be watered down due to playing too much of the BETA.

Big mistake. The more I played of the game, the more I realised it is absolutely crap as a platformer. You can throw all this stuff about creating levels and all the community stuff at me but none of that can hide the fact that it is unforgivably flawed as a platform game.

LBP is meant to be fun and aimed at bringing on board ‘casuals’ or some of the Wii crowd (aswell as regular gamers), or so we are led to believe. How can a game that infuriates so much due to broken controls that makes controlling Sackboy so infuriating, appeal to people that just want to have fun, when it sucks all the fun out of the experience!

The amount of times I died because Sackboy skidded on a platform or failed to jump high enough or far enough to reach a perfectly reachable platform was bordering on the ridiculous. There was even an incident where one of the bouncy platforms toppled over meaning I couldn’t progress any further on that level so I had to quit out of it!!

I’m talking about the Story levels btw, not user created levels.

LBP is supposed to be a platformer yet it fails, as far as I’m concerned, to get the basic elements of what makes platform games so much fun. The physics in the game cause far too many problems for me. When I jump, I want to be able to actually control myself how far and high I jump, not end up with seemingly random heights and distances regardless of how hard or light I press the jump button. When my character lands he should not continue to move as if he’s on an ice platform and fall on to spikes or to it’s death.

Everything has to be so precise in LBP. This completely takes away the fun of the experience and massively reduces the pick up and play factor for me.

I really can’t see any of the supposed ‘casual gamers’ sticking with a game that can infuriate so easily.

I decided to have a quick play with the level creater tools but gave up as everything felt too fiddly and time consuming. You may argue that I should put the time in to get the best out of this side of LBP but I simply do not have the time to do this.

As a result, LBP became an incredibly annoying game, so much so that I traded it in yesterday and got the flawed and buggy Fallout 3 instead.

Maybe Media Molecule should’ve actually spent more time on getting the game mechanics and platforming elements right and made the platforming fun and enjoyable as a result.

The mass majority will probably not agree with what I’ve written but hey, that’s life. If you love LBP, great! I however will not recommend this game to anyone based on how poor it is as a platformer.

EDIT: Even Media Molecule boss Mark Healey isn’t entirely happy with the control scheme in LBP. Check out the 5.10 mark onwards in this video.