Sunday, September 19, 2010

TGS: EA Wants You to Create Like a sticker book plus puzzles.



EA's Play Label is designed to harbor family-friendly titles and is currently publishing Create, which if you look at the game's marketing appears to be an attempt at a LittleBigPlanet clone. However, when I played the game at Tokyo Game Show I found the experience to more of a mixture of a sticker book and the DS puzzle game Scribblenauts. 

The sticker book resemblance is pretty obvious once you pick up the game and start to customize a particular world. You can switch out the background and place buildings and objects to fill up the space to be just the way you want it. Of course all the areas you decorate can be uploaded to the Internet so that others can see what you've made and download it. There's also the option to tweak other people's creations and re-upload it as a modified version of the original. 

Design-wise, almost anything can be created, from a space station to the Egyptian pyramids. The options get even larger once you unlock all of the content. Unlocking new items can be done by either designing an area or completing puzzle challenges. See, the customization feature is only a small fraction of Create, as the actual gameplay is founded on puzzles found throughout the hub worlds. 

Create features four different types of puzzles with goofy titles -- Scoretacular, Contraption-O-Matic, Pick Up Party and Object Challenge, which apparently drew the short straw when they were all picking names. All of these types have their own set of rules, so Scoretacular is basically a "get from Point A to Point B" puzzle where you have unlimited resources, but need to collect gem pieces to get the highest score. Other challenges like Contraption-O-Matic and Pick Up Party have restrictions on how many objects you can use, while Object Challenge only offers a small selection of objects to work with. Essentially all of them require you to get from one place to another, but you can solve the problem any way you'd like, sort of like Scribblenauts. 

The controls are really simple, which is good because children need to be able to use it. I used a PlayStation Move wand for my demo and waved through the catalogue of stuff to choose from, which appeared in a line at the bottom of the screen. When everything is unlocked there's a lot of stuff to go through, so I'm not entirely sure how easy it will be to find what you're looking for in that large lineup of things. 

With 14 different world hubs you can decorate, 140 puzzles to solve and hundreds of objects to unlock, there's definitely a lot of content to explore in Create. I'm sure it will be well-received by folks looking for a family-friendly game when it launches this November on PlayStation 3 (with Move support), Xbox 360, PC and Wii (the Wii version does not have the online sharing functionality).
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