Today at E3, I had the opportunity to play the latest from one of my favorite Sony franchises. LittleBigPlanet Karting is the newest addition to the LBP family. I’m going to be honest; I was underwhelmed.
Sure, it has the adorable sackboy characters in the equally adorable world of LBP with the added fun of racing, but it honestly played exactly like a less exciting version of Mario Kart. When I played the demo, I think I was racing through some kind of space station. Along the way, you pick up points bubbles and try to stay on the track. Occasionally you can pick up these little guns that do different things, sort of like the boxes you pick up in Mario Kart. One lets you shoot rockets, one turns your car into a giant boxing glove that, I assume, knocks others out of your way. I was too far behind everyone else to know, which brings up another of my complaints about the game. The controls were different from those I’m used to from the original LBP games. There’s a few sections in LBP Karting where you go over a jump and gave to use your grappling hook to get across. While in LBP and LBP 2 you’d press R1 to grapple, in this game the command was changed to L1. Really confusing, and I definitely missed a few jumps before I forced myself out of the habit.
I can only hope there’s some more cool stuff to the game that I didn’t see today, but as of right now I don’t think I’d buy it. I already own Mario Kart.
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I think a kart racing game might be gaming’s version of jumping the shark.