Create

LittleBigWhat?

Posted 2 years ago By - Jay Acevedo

At first, one would have thought that EA’s idea of creating mind-bending levels and sharing them with your friends would carry the same amount of promise that games like LittleBigPlanet brought to the gaming community. With Create, the minds over at EA Bright Light were tasked with bringing a new way to satisfy the creative minds, by proposing a game where levels need to be solved by manipulating certain objects. Basically, something vaguely similar to Media Molecule’s award-winning game, but not a carbon copy. However, when a niche game like this one doesn’t get the proper development love and attention it needs to achieve those expectations, the final result ends up being an underwhelming experience.

While LittleBigPlanet was a game with creation tools, Create can be described as creation tool for gaming purposes. The premise is fairly simple: each of the fourteen levels featured in the game comes with its own unique set of puzzle-based challenges. Example: there’s a car on one end, a cliff and a ring on the other side. The goal is to make the car jump over the cliff and pass through the ring. Use the provided items (in this case, a ramp and a rocket) to achieve the objective. Once the level is solved, you’ll be rewarded with Sparks, which will unlock more items with which you’ll get to use in the subsequent levels. While the first levels and challenges are fairly simple, others will lead you to build more complex contraptions.

The “creation” part kicks in afterwards. Once you’ve unlocked enough new items, you can pair them with the different tools, including textures, brushes, stickers and even creatures to fully personalize and/or modify the existing levels, then share them with the Create online community. New levels, from both Create community and even EA, can also be downloaded to your console.

All that does sound interesting on paper, but my biggest gripe about Create comes from the fact that you aren’t “creating” per say but instead decorating and modifying existing worlds with functional - yet extremely limited - editing tools. Plus, no matter how talented you are at creating levels, the challenges are - and will always be - to bring a certain object from Point A to Point B. Once the novelty wears off, even the most devoted Create player will pack his things and leave for something else.

Additionally, the controls aren’t very intuitive and finding your way through the menu system will become an hassle. Pair it with a inconsistent camera and you get a little more than you’ve bargained for. However, once you get a feel for it, it does become manageable. Although, even after a few hours, I was still pressing the wrong buttons. Patience will be needed. If you have Playstation Move at home, the game does support it and I will strongly suggest to make that your primary control scheme. It’s not perfect, but it is much easier and considerably more fun.

Electronic Arts has already a great line-up of inventive games like Spore, the upcoming Darkspore and to a certain extent, The Sims. Note that all three games have a certain charm about them, either brought on by the world it’s set in or the characters within those worlds. Here, it’s hard to feel an emotional attachment to a plant or a basketball. I mean, didn’t LittleBigPlanet became notable because of Sackboy? Granted, EA didn’t fell the need to copy an existing franchise -a good thing, mind you - and decided to go a different route. But when you’re introducing a brand new IP that has its roots based upon creativity and originality, some things could have been done differently. Especially when, at least for the PS3 players, it will immediately be compared to its Media Molecule predecessor.

Now, if the gaming world needed Create, I would think a downloadable version might have been a better choice. Then again, I remember EA branding this game as a family title, which explains its presence at retail. Truth is, games like these always tend to be submerged by others and forgotten if not marketed properly. When was the last time you heard EA even mention the game after its official announcement? And I can’t possibly imagine Create was intended to be marketed as an “Introduction to LittleBigPlanet” kind of product...because I’m not seeing young kids having fun with this. In other words, Create is a unicorn/bubble-gum version of The Incredible Machine.

Conclusion

Create is a nice attempt from EA at taking a bite of the Play.Create.Share cake but in the end, its lack of personality and limited appeal makes an extremely difficult game to love. I’m not saying its a bad game, but there’s only so much satisfaction a gamer can get out of building contraptions before switching to something far more interesting and fully fleshed out.