Sackboy: A Big Adventure review

Reviewed on: PS5

Sackboy: A Big Adventure is a good change from the first games in the franchise and may please those who want a laid-back action/adventure game.

To try to place you and spark your interest in this game, let me explain:

In the first Little Big Planet games, the game was basically a side-scroller with stylized graphics, where we played as the rag doll Sackboy.

This time, the game gained a top-down view, veeeeery similar to the view in Super Mario 3D World.
But despite the semi-plagiarism, this view and the new gameplay style worked very well for the game.

We have a jump button, one for dodge and one for attack, and the triangle button practically only works during the jump, to do the famous “butt stomp” of Nintendo’s famous plumber.
But here in Sackboy: A Big Adventure, you slam your head into the ground instead. You can also float a little by holding the jump button, and grab some objects and enemies. In some levels, you get special tools that can be used with the R1 button.

The gameplay is very simple and functional; enemies can be defeated with attacks, or by jumping on their heads.
Sackboy can take two hits before losing a life, and if you lose all 5 lives, you have to restart from the beginning of the level.
Within the levels, there are checkpoints scattered around so you don’t go back to the start with every life lost.

The game is divided into 5 worlds, with several levels within each world and with several different objectives in each level. After finishing, one more explorable world appears.

The main one is collecting the dream orbs, which are used to open the path to each world’s boss, and later will serve to progress in an extra world after the end of the game.
The game also has other secrets: every level has several skins to customize your Sackboy, and plenty of “money” in uncommon places, money that can be used in the little shop to buy other skins that are not collectible in the levels.

You can always see your overall progress in the game, or in a specific world or level, very easily and quickly, so you always know what is left to do in each of the levels.

The whole game can be played with up to 4 people at the same time (I didn’t test that part), and also cooperative levels, which can only be accessed if you are playing with 1 or more friends.

On the technical side, the game on PS5 has practically no loading, at most 3 or 4 seconds and you are back in control.
At this point, it is very cool because you don’t lose time on loading screens when you are trying to get a gold trophy in some challenge.

I played the PlayStation 5 version and there was no FPS drop or freeze of any kind. The game is running smoothly.

I won’t go into detail about the game’s story, but I will say that the story is very simple and excellent for a young audience.
The game is fully dubbed, which helps small children who can’t read yet a lot, since they can understand the story thanks to the dubbing.

One last detail: don’t play this game immediately after finishing Astro Playroom.
Astro is a much more agile 3D action game with free camera control. Sackboy: A Big Adventure is more measured.
I made that mistake and ended up hating Sackboy at the start, but after I got used to Sackboy’s more “calm” gameplay, I saw that it really is a good game.

The game lasted about 15 hours of gameplay, and in the first two worlds I was excited about collecting all the collectibles and secrets, but then I just played normally to see the end of the game. At some point I will go back to try to get 100% in the levels and maybe a Platinum.

The game was provided by Sony PlayStation Brasil for review.