DLC #199 - LittleBigPlanet 3 - The Journey Home

It's fitting that the premise of The Journey Home revolves around somebody dropping the ball.

I was willing to go into this final foray with an open mind, despite some reservations about the workmanship of LittleBigPlanet 3 that were well documented in my Platinum Difficulty Review. Underneath this brief, post-game exterior remains an unpolished game plagued by technical issues. Blue screen crashes, corrupted save files and loss of progress. It's clear that there was an abandonment of this game that has hurt the reputation of the series.

The Journey Home begins where the main story ends. After saving Bunkem, Sackboy and friends are teleported back into Craftworld, ready to be welcomed home by a surprise party. However, the teleporter beam malfunctions and the force of the beam whips the unsent invitations to the remaining party guests out into the world, and it's now your job to find and retrieve them.

This will require progression through a series of new levels where the reward of an invitation sits at the end of each one, and once all 6 have been gathered, the party will finally be able to go ahead.

The pack contains 6 new trophies, all of which are obtained via the new selection of Story levels on offer. This is broken down into 3 main Adventure levels and 3 Multiplayer side missions. There are trophies awarded for both completing and Acing each of the 3 Adventure levels, which are both fairly easy tasks and should take no longer than an hour or so. There is a level dedicated to each of the new heroes - OddSock, Toggle and Swoop. Their lack of usage within the main game was something I was slightly critical of within the Platinum Difficulty review, so it's good to see at least a little bit more advocacy for these characters.

Toggle gains access to the Springinator within his level, which also comes attached with it's own trophy after using it 100 times. The Springinator is a new device that allows him to bounce up to harder to reach places. It's nice to see a neat little gameplay addition, but the variety in content with a game like LBP has always stemmed from it's unique level designs, which are all refreshingly charming in their own way in The Journey Home. It's just a shame that there are only 3 main Adventure levels.

However, the package does heavily lean towards a Multiplayer emphasis that may cause a few struggles along the way;

Two's Company, Four's a Party - Complete any Adventure level with 4 players.

The original intention of this trophy was to encourage community play, and this would have been easy enough to achieve at the height of the game. However, the only way to unlock this trophy now is to have 4 different controllers and finish a level in local co-operative play instead, so if you want this trophy and don't have the required amount of peripherals, you'll need to find a way to acquire them. 

Under normal circumstances, I would usually cut a bit slack for this. After all, the server closure wasn't the fault of the development team, and the action was necessarily drastic to prevent further harm to the LBP community. However, when you've got previous form for this, I feel like you relinquish the benefit of doubt. Two of the LittleBigPlanet 2 DLC packs have become permanently unobtainable to 100% for me purely because they required me to invest in peripherals and that was something I'd refused to do until it was too late. The only reason I grabbed this trophy was because I have 4 controllers anyway, but it's a tough cost to justify for anyone who doesn't and would only be purchasing them for the sake of this trophy.

Loosely linking into this, the 3 Multiplayer side missions also require at least 2 players to complete, and they're both directly linked to a further 2 trophies requiring all Prize Bubbles and obtaining all 6 Invitations to the party. They're all used as rewards for reaching a certain points threshold (30,000 points) within each mini-game. The first one can easily be beaten solo using 2 controllers, but the other 2 will need an actual second player to support well enough to obtain the threshold score. Not only are there multiple pieces of hardware standing in your way of full completion, but you'll also need the services of another person sitting next to you to help out anyway. If you're solo player, these are big barriers to completion.

On a final note, I began to have issues towards the end of this package when attempting to complete the side levels with a second person using another controller. The game would begin to blue screen error at the post-level loading page and upon rebooting the game, the Prize Bubbles would remain uncollected. There were also a couple of notifications that the save had been corrupted and we had to restore via a prompt. 

I had to remedy this by just making sure I collected the Prize Bubbles only and didn't trigger the end of the level via the finishing screen. If you've collected the Prize Bubbles, you can just exit the level without actually officially finishing it. It took a handful of attempts to work this out as a viable workaround, but it's a real shame some awful technical issues reared their head once again.

When it's working, The Journey Home is at least a serviceable offering. It doesn't break any new ground, but it's still good, hearty fun and the levels of creativity maintain a high standard. It's a little bit on the shallow side with just 3 main Adventure levels and 3 mini-game side missions, and the complications of requiring multiple controllers, another person to combat the mini-games with and eventually having to juggle some unexpected technical errors near the end had me questioning whether the balance had actually tipped towards the downside of the scale.

Platinum #139 - LittleBigPlanet 3

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 4/10

When LittleBigPlanet first hit the Playstation 3 in 2008, it genuinely seemed like it was destined for great things, but a series of decisions over the years has put the series in an tough place.

The most significant of these changes was seeing Media Molecule step away from development to make way for Sumo Digital, who would be in charge of development of a LittleBigPlanet game for the first time.

More recently, an unexpected external attack on the servers led to the decision to indefinitely bring them down for the first 3 main LittleBigPlanet games on all platforms.

This was a somewhat forced decision, but there have been some choices made that have raised questions. Other, less forgivable decisions include; LittleBigPlanet Karting servers being closed within just 6 years of the game's launch and LittleBigPlanet 2 DLC packs requiring you to purchase expensive peripherals to earn some of it's trophies, in an undoubtedly advantageous cash-in ploy on Sony's hardware. Even the DLC for this game, The Journey Home, was suddenly delisted and cannot be acquired unless you'd already purchased it.

When you think about it, it's been a tumultuous period that not many franchises would survive.

However, losing the servers was the real killing blow. It's always going to be a big problem when the premise of your game is based around user-generated content, and you suddenly lose half your product because that element becomes instantly inaccessible to everyone with no alternate solution to keep it alive. It wasn't just losing the ability to play through story levels with others co-operatively online. What use is still having offline access to this massive level creation tool full of possibilities without being able to actually share your creations with the masses? It effectively became redundant.

These were ultimately big issues with the game and I personally felt the series regressed with LittleBigPlanet 3.

The main showpiece is the Adventure Mode. The tutorial is interrupted by a character called Newton, who creates a black hole, sending Sackboy into a world called Bunkem. It's explained to Sackboy that Nana Pud is about to open a tin containing 3 Titans, that were locked away to protect Bunkem many years ago, and this needs to be prevented. Stopping Nana Pud allows Newton access to the tin, and upon opening it himself, he garners the power of the 3 Titans and this turns out to have been his ulterior motive all along. It's now Sackboys job to stop him and restore order to Bunkem.

The game retains it's warm charm, simple controls and pick up and play nature that has made it accessible to anyone and everyone over the years. The biggest new addition is the fact you can now play as different types of Sackboy. Throughout the Adventure Mode, you'll play as Swoop, who harnesses the ability of flight, Oddsock, who can sprint and bounce off surfaces, and Toggle, who can shapeshift into becoming a smaller or larger version of himself.

Sadly, it's a criminally underused element of the game. They each get their own introductory levels to showcase their uniqueness in comparison to the regular Sackboy, but are then only used in brief capacity thereafter. Their unique properties add some great variety to the way some levels play out and it would have been nice to see how far this creativity could be stretched. It's a genuine missed opportunity.

Other new gameplay mechanics include the Blink Ball, a gun that fires an orb that can instantly teleport you, and the Boost Boots, which can propel you to higher, previously unreachable, parts of the landscape. The Velociporters, also a new addition, can quickly send you through different layers of the level, and are used creatively in puzzles. Naturally, all of these new toys are available within the creation tool.

I've always taken an apathetic stance towards the creation elements of LBP. That's not the game, that's me. I've just never had the patience to learn how to be good at making levels, and without the ability to share them with anybody due to the lack of any online service, it almost feels like barely worth giving a mention to.

The creativity on display in the Adventure mode levels is still great and the mini-games are inventive and fun. It's a bit buggy at times though. I've been stuck on infinite loading screens, lost Prize Bubbles off the edge of a level and the framerate is still choppy when there's a lot going on at once on screen. These may seem like small niggles, but when you fall through the landscape for no reason half-way through an attempt to ace a level, they become much more viable complaints. I did also manage to play the game in online co-op before the servers were axed, and it was always laggy when another player was in the level with me, even when connected to different people.

In terms of the trophies, this is a medium sized list, containing 32 trophies, including the Platinum, all of which are evenly distributed amongst 3 main areas of the game, starting with the Adventure Mode.

Most of the trophies within the list are earned here. To be precise, 14 of the 32 trophies are achieved through Adventure Mode, which is almost half the list, and these are mainly progression-based.

The Adventure Mode feels shorter than it has in previous titles. There are 20 main levels to complete, and although there are a generous number of additional mini-game levels, the majority of these do not factor into the trophy list, with only a couple required to be beaten for separate trophies. If you want to spend time discovering all the secrets in a level, where you can often find Prize Bubbles and Multiplayer segments, you can easily squeeze around 7-8 hours from the story. 

However, one of the main reasons the Adventure Mode seems shorter, is due to the absence of a trophy relating to the collection of all the Prize Bubbles, which had featured in both previous trophy lists in the series. Without this, there isn't a necessity to explore the entire level, where Prize Bubbles would usually be hidden in harder to reach places. These were also sometimes unavailable first time round, and you'd need a sticker or a tool that you only obtain later, and would therefore have to come back and replay the level. Prize Bubbles also used to be annoying for the fact they were often provided as rewards for beating the Multiplayer aspects of story levels, usually requiring 3 or 4 players locally using the same number of controllers or online with the required amount of people, both of which caused challenges for different reasons.

Not having to worry about collecting all the Prize Bubbles means you can just go through the main path of the level, and can also therefore complete it much faster. There is still a trophy awarded for Acing each level, and this also seemed much easier than before. I remember some tough levels in previous LBP games, yet there's nothing here that gave me a challenge when it came to beating it without dying. 

The "Don't go alone..." trophy, awarded for Completing all the Adventure levels with another Sack Thing is where the path became rocky. I'd originally attempted this trophy when the online element was still accessible, just using the "Dive in" feature to quickly matchmake with another player and beat the level with them. This seemed to be going fairly well, aside the horrendously laggy connection that was a constant throughout, but it seemed like the most viable way to Ace levels and beat them with another player simultaneously.

However, the trophy didn't pop. All 20 levels beaten with different online players, and no trophy. I'd read it was buggy and that the only real solution was to just replay it all over again. So that's exactly what I did, except this time, in local co-op with another controller. I'd beaten all 20 levels with another Sackboy idle throughout and still didn't get my trophy. That's 2 full playthroughs of the Adventure Mode with nothing to show for it.

My next step was to delete the save game data and go for a third run. Ironically, the shortest Adventure Mode in any LBP game was quickly becoming the longest and this summed up my thoughts on the buggy nature of the game. Thankfully though, I didn't need to resort to restarting a new save file. After playing through each level twice I'd noticed that a small handful of them had not recorded a leaderboard score, which was also something I'd read about. Before committing to deletion of my save file, I jumped back into a couple of these levels, and the trophy popped upon completion of one of them and we finally had it.

This was clearly just a little bit buggy, but just to further add to the frustrations, one of the most useful tools for trophy hunters within LBP, has always been the Pins. These would show you tracked progress for certain trophies, and where there were numeric requirements attached to them, you'd also see how much you'd need for a particular trophy. This trophy is tracked here, but for whatever reason, it won't show you how many levels you've beaten with another Sack Thing, so effectively may aswell not be here. Just about summed it all up.

The "A guy called Quest" trophy, awarded for Completing all the Quests in LittleBigPlanet 3 Adventure Mode, requires you to complete a listed set of individual tasks. These are simple requirements, often related to Story levels or Mini-Games, and do not require you to do anything too taxing. In fact, they're fairly easy and some of them are actually just awarded for progression-related milestones tied to reaching certain points in the story.

Unfortunately, the reason they're notable in this particular instance is because 3 of the 15 quests require multiple players to complete, with one of them requiring the maximum total of 4. Whilst it is a positive that you can still complete the quest solo, you will still need 4 separate controllers, and given the lack of online access restricts the route of grouping up with others, you'll need to have 4 controllers specifically for this part only. It's frustrating that it's literally only a single quest that requires this, and this classic LBP stunt has made me somewhat resentful towards the game. I really don't want to dislike you LBP, but you're putting me in a tough spot.

Just when you think you've gotten through the main parts of the game, and realised that any additional peripherals may have been excluded from thought upon realisation that the Prize Bubbles areas are excluded from trophy list requirements, they still somehow find a way to make sure you're forking out for some extra hardware to keep Sony happy. Keep hold of those controllers too if you intend to dive into the DLC - Spoiler, but you're going to need them.

To shake the sour taste that leaves behind, the Popit Puzzles are a refreshing addition - Effectively tutorials on how to use basic and advanced versions of the toolkit, but rather than just show you how to use them, they task you with beating levels by demonstrating that you have a reasonable understanding of them. Slightly more engaging than the typical tutorial, and you can earn trophies for beating and acing both term 1 and term 2 of the Academy, as well as another trophy for "graduating" - Which is effectively just earning the prior 4 trophies related to the Popit Puzzle mode.

The final mode you'll need to explore is the creation mode. This is where the heart and soul of any LBP game is meant to exist, and whilst I've already said it's just not the sort of thing that's ever really interested me, I have always appreciated the levels that other people have spent their time and effort into putting out for others to enjoy.

There are 8 trophies you can earn within the create tool here, and they're all incredibly effortless, to the point where you can achieve them all in less than 10 minutes. This is a far cry from LBP 1, where possibly the most infamous LBP trophy ever existed - To spend 24 active hours in create mode. The significant dilution of the create feature in the trophy list is very welcome, and it's the easiest step within this whole process. Place a few specific items down on the canvas, play around with a couple of level effects and then max out the thermometer with some mass copy and pasting. Job done.

Finally, there are 3 online trophies within the list too, which require access to community levels. They are also incredibly seamless tasks, but do now unfortunately make this Platinum unobtainable if you didn't grab them prior to the closure of the servers. 

LittleBigPlanet 3 is undoubtedly the easiest Platinum in the series thus far. It actually almost drops below the baseline standard for difficulty of 3/10. If it wasn't for the buggy "Don't go it alone..." trophy causing me the frustration that it did, along with some of the general frustrations that make the game a bit of an unenjoyable slog at times then you could very well argue the case for it being one of the easiest in the collection. It can have an entire additional point on the rating for the forced peripherals.

No necessity to collect the Prize Bubbles, a create mode that only requires around 10 minutes of your time and in worst case scenario, you can navigate your way through the required Multiplayer elements, specifically the Adventure Mode, as a solo player controlling more than one Sackboy at once, unlike previous titles that have required 3 or 4 players due to the way these segments were built. It's annoying that the necessity for extra hardware has become a habit for an LBP title though, and realising you'll need 4 controllers is a real "urgh" feeling. A step backwards for the series in every way, including the difficulty of the trophy list.

Notable Trophies -

Don't go alone... - Complete all the Adventure levels with another Sack Thing.
A guy called Quest - Complete all the Quests in LittleBigPlanet 3 Adventure Mode.

Hardest Trophy -

Don't go alone...

Complete all the Adventure levels with another Sack Thing

DLC #198 - Assassin's Creed Origins - The Curse of the Pharaohs

"Would you like to Boost your character to level 45 before you start this DLC?"

Erm - OK? I was already level 44 anyway, but if you insist. After all, there's a trophy contained within this content to reach level 55, so why not?

I would guess the benefit to this offering is to allow much lower levelled players to enjoy the DLC content without having to put the hours into levelling their character up to reach it. 

I personally wouldn't categorise The Curse of the Pharaohs as "must see" content to the point where you absolutely have to make it instantly accessible to all, but it is an improvement on The Hidden Ones, albeit just very slightly.

Desecrated tombs, Spirits rising from the dead and back and forth ventures into the Afterlife. This time, Bayek is called to the city of Thebes, overrun by evil spirits, angered by the theft of artefacts contained within their burial tombs. The city is being terrorised by Pharaohs of the past whose spirits have been resurrected via a curse in order to seek death upon those who have pillaged their tombs of it's riches.

Naturally, Bayek's role is to prevent the curse from spreading, and ultimately do what needs to be done to bring peace upon Egypt again. Also naturally, this will involve a lot of killing. It seems to be the common progression tree for Assassin's Creed story arcs.

Each of the Pharaohs you encounter terrorising Egypt are significant historical figures of the past, and each of them will need to be banished into the Afterlife in order to lift the curse for good. These new environments are welcome for you to explore in great depth, and each of them reflects on the Pharoah they're attached too. Both the Pharaohs and their relevant Afterlife are the best parts of this DLC package and these new parts of the map finally look like you're exploring completely new areas of the game, and don't feel like they've just been subject to bland copy and paste work, which was my biggest disappointment of The Hidden Ones DLC.

New enemy types await. Aside the Pharoah's themselves, new enemies include Cultists, Giant Scorpions and Mummies. The addition of Star Shards as a crafting material now also allow you to further upgrade your equipment to new strengths once enough of them have been collected and there are some shiny new Legendary weapons to get your hands on too.

It's a better package than The Hidden Ones, but it's still far from perfect, and the main faults I encountered with this content reared their head when I was pursing the trophies.

The package comes with 6 trophies in total. There is a secret trophy awarded upon completion of the Main Quest arc, which contains 5 quests. There's nothing really outside of the ordinary here and the primary focus of the story is stopping the curse sweeping across Thebes by taking down the identified Pharaohs whose spirits walk the land. Each of them put up a tough fight, but if you're well versed with the combat system, they shouldn't take too long to dispatch. Most of my deaths were my own fault, mainly attempting to over-extend attacks in order to finish fights quicker and leaving myself exposed to devastatingly powerful combos which will instantly kill you.

However, the pacing of the game is off here. This content was going absolutely fine. It was nicely paced, fights felt fair and there wasn't a feeling that I was ever behind the curve. Then suddenly, I hit a brick wall with the difficulty scaling. Enemies suddenly became overpowered very quickly as they scale faster than you in terms of levelling, making fights unnecessarily challenging. I understand that the intention in this is to make the player take a break from the main quests and invest some time into levelling Bayek further via side content, but I just felt aggreged about having to do that given how dull the side content in this game is. This is my biggest criticism of the package.

There's a lot of exploration and fetch-questing too. Probably a bit too much for my personal liking. You seem to be scouring a building for clues every other objective, and I think it slows the pace of the game down way too much in it's frequency.

The other trophies outside of this are at least fairly straight-forward. There is a Gold trophy awarded for completing the 5 Serqet locations, which you more than likely won't be able to do until you're close to level 55 anyway. The Scorpions present at these locations that you'll need to kill are all level 58, and will make light work of you anywhere south of level 55, but they're easy enough to take down once you're of a strong enough level.

The importance of levelling has been mentioned a handful of times already, and it's mainly down to one trophy;

Higher Power - Reach level 55 (The Curse of the Pharaohs)

First issue. For what reason do you need to raise the level cap a whole 10 levels from 45 to 55 when this clearly exceeds the amount of experience the main questline gives you? I'd only just reached level 51 once I'd beaten every story mission and had to turn to alternative solutions in order to earn the remaining amount of required experience to hit level 55. Why are you pushing me to complete loads of mundane side missions and locations. Again. 

Second issue. It just takes far too long to reach level 55. As stated, I was at the beginning of level 51 once I'd beaten the main questline, and from this point, you need to accumulate roughly 140k of experience points to reach level 55.

If you visit the Bureau of the Hidden Ones in Memphis in the main game, there is a vendor who sells Tablets of Knowledge. These objects cost 1,000 coins, and in return, will grant you 1,000 experience points. A great way to easily boost your level. Providing you have the money. Which I didn't really have. After selling all the surplus in my inventory, I barely had enough to purchase myself an entire level. What's my option from here?

Grinding out the remaining 100k experience points on side quests and conquering locations. It was the onion topping on the ice cream sundae. I have somehow found myself in a position where I've ended the Origins DLC experience in the exact same way I had ended the Platinum experience - With an element of post-game grinding necessary to achieve my end goal. I didn't like it then, and I don't like it now.

Granted, it wasn't anywhere near as laborious as the "Old Habits" trophy in the main game, but it just felt like an extension of the same activities and quests, and here I was repeating them all over again. This process took roughly an additional 5/6 hours to finally reach level 55. It made me wish I'd kept more items back in my inventory to take advantage of the Tablets of Knowledge.

The DLC doesn't change my overall opinion on Origins. The refresh is exactly what the series needed, and it's still exciting to see what this looks like moving forward, but the DLC is very average when you balance the pros and cons. This package is slightly better than The Hidden Ones, if only for the fact you actually see some different environments that don't look like direct extracts from the main game's map, but is soured by poor scaling and an unnecessary grind to the finish line.