Little Big Planet 3

We see a lot of creators take inspiration from games they love. This time round, we have a Diablo III-inspired adventure. Among the numerous improvements and additions in Little Big Planet 3, the inclusion of the Adventure Map, the quest tracker and the ability to save a player’s progress was always going to lead to lengthy, complete-games-in-their-ownright sort of creations.

That’s where Felkroth’s adventure,Treasure Hunter, comes in, combining a ton of fancy new LBP3 features to make a top-down,Diablo III-style RPG. In truth, he’s had a bit of practice with this sort of level, previously having made levels in LBP2 with a similar overhead view point.Now with the added ability of tracking quests, however, this concept is all the more fleshed out. It also handily helps to save your progress, so you can quit, return and finish off the level – or even grind a little bit more, like in all good RPGs – whenever youwant. Best of all is howthere are four different classes to play: the archer, the mage, the warrior and the monk.You can probably guess what the differences between each of these classes are but all the same, they each have their own set of abilities, outfits and even animations.

That’s all thanks to the Character Animation Tweaker, by the way, one of the new tools in LBP3 that lets you hand-craft your own be spoke animations, rather than tediously recording each one with a Sackbot. The level is playable with up to four players, too, so like any good hack-and-slash RPG, you can jump in with your friends, argue over who plays what class and take on masses of enemies together. That Diablo III comparison isn’t actually all that far off, either. While there is a town to explore and NPCs to meet, this adventure also has a randomly generated map to play in. When you head off to the combat areas to complete whichever quests you’ve been given, you’re actually being placed inside a randomly created zone, one that pieces different tile sets together – just like Diablo III.

You can use the quest tracker to find the objective easily enough but the fact that you can return a second time to find the routes have changed and even the monsters you fight are different is great. Paths connect, side-routes appear for extra rewards but there’s always an end and plenty of varying creatures for you to slay. It’s important that you do slay them, too, because like every good RPG, you do start fairly weak and even some of the early enemies you encounter might prove a challenge. As you kill, however, you earn cash – or Collectables, in this case – which can be spent on upgrades to your class and even special items to help you on your adventure.

You can decide whether to spend all your points on extra health or attack damage, or save up and buy that new interesting looking item; we’re not kidding when we say this is basically a fully-fledged RPG. And best of all, since it’s all part of an adventure map, more and more can be added to the level – like DLC, but for free and inside Little Big Planet 3 itself. You should definitely check this level out and, if you do enjoy it, you will certainly want to Heart it and return again and again since there may be new areas to visit or new beasts to batter each time you do.

Time Taken to Make: Two weeks

Number of Plays: 24,146

Platform: PS 3 & PS 4