Little Big Planet™

The answer is that it's absolutely fantastic, an instant classic that actually turned out to be better than my expectations. The community and creation stuff was bound to be reason enough to own the game, but the included content put together by Media Molecule is so good that even if the level building tools weren't in the picture, this would still be a must-have experience.

That's not to say that it's without faults. There are a handful of things that can be cleaned up or fixed by way of patches that are a little annoying at the moment (which I'll come back to in a bit), but they barely mar the surface of an overall game that is nothing short of brilliant in terms of both its design and implementation.
When you first start up the game, your only option will be to hit up the main Story mode. The first three levels (which are the same that were featured in the beta, if you played that) serve as good tutorials for how to play the game. In terms of mechanics, this is about as pure and basic a control setup as you can get. The X button jumps, R1 grabs objects, and that's about it. If you grab a jetpack, you can either shake the controller or tap one of the face buttons to remove it, but that ends your control mechanics (outside of the editor, of course).

While that sounds simple, and it is, it's the level design that makes the whole Story progression the fantastic experience that it is. The first set of levels is fairly easy and will look familiar to anyone who's followed the game at all. The cool thing though is that every other level in the game (of which there are more than 20 "main" levels) is completely unique. Each themed area has three main stages, and while those generally use a lot of the same art assets and look very similar, what you're doing there in each individual area is very different. The jungle areas have you swinging from monkeys, climbing giraffes and riding on buffaloes. The Metropolis stages have you navigate sewers, hop between subway cars and drag race. There's a wild west set of levels that rely on plenty of explosives and mine cart rides, and every other section is just as varied (if not more so) than these.

Really, Media Molecule has done an amazing job of giving you something cool to do in one level, then switching it up and giving you something completely different for the next without ever really repeating ideas throughout the entire game. It's all platforming, sure, but the variance within that frame does nothing short of pushing the limits of the genre.

GAMEPLAY: