Sackboy: A Big Adventure
PS4, PS5
Given his standing as a PlayStation pioneer, it’s only right and proper that the former Media Molecule mascot should be there on day one of PS5. But despite his experience, Sackboy’s shift from 2.5 to 3D platforming seems to have given him a dose of stage fright. His Big Adventure – and there really is a lot more of it than you might expect – begins with an unfathomably boring first stage, the most tentative of openings to a high-profile game in living memory. Many people are going to be put off, though this inexplicably slow starter does eventually improve. It’s certainly rich in ideas and visual invention, although as a platformer it falls short where it matters most.
As ever with Sackboy, his handling is a persistent problem. He’s lost that lingering floatiness, though Sumo Sheffield has gone too far the other way, making him sluggish and heavy. Attacks see him lurch forward awkwardly, carrying him into harm’s way. Exacerbated by excessive use of haptic feedback, there’s a heft to everything he does that doesn’t fit the character, and leaves him feeling leaden. This isn’t a difficult game, but it’s a sporadically frustrating one because he’s never as responsive as you’d like: a good percentage of the deaths we suffer don’t feel like our own fault. And if Sackboy once encouraged us to share, here he’s more of a borrower, half-inching several mechanics from Mario – although its focus on slow-paced exploration puts it closer to Yoshi’s Woolly World than the plumber’s 3D one.
Its checkpoints and overall challenge are forgiving enough for all that to matter less than you’d think. And you’ll be compelled to look past the perfunctory combat, the odd lack of polish and the surfeit of visual distractions as it steadily gains in confidence, growing giddy with ideas until it almost feels like a game composed entirely of one-off asides. There are monkey rescues, piñata nests stuffed with explosive wasps and monsters that burst into piles of the punningly-named Collectabells when overfed with chillis. Rocket fireworks made of cork screech up through cotton-wool platforms, a bell-gathering minigame takes place on a giant phone’s lock screen and an underwater treasure hunt asks you to leap off and back on to a descending submarine to retrieve nuggets of gold. As we walk up walls with sticky-honey footprints, sporting a disco wig, Viking beard and punk-rock piercings, we’re charmed but also a little frustrated: with some refinement and a slight injection of pace, this could have been more than the archetypal fine-but-flawed launch title it is. Undemanding kids will have a whale of a time, but from an innovator like Sackboy, we’ve come to expect a little more.