The danger in sequels, particularly to a successful series that you enjoyed playing before, is that you’ll run out and buy the sequel without giving serious thought to whether or not the game will really satisfy you.

I enjoyed LittleBigPlanet 3, but I could have waited before purchasing it.

It’s not that the story was bad … though it was a bit short.  The visuals in the story were as striking as ever.  Gameplay was never frustrating.

In fact, the story was good enough to connect the various levels together, but the game suffers from issues where they give you work to do (find three heroes in order to banish the antagonist) but then give you minimal time to play the heroes (essentially, one or two levels each at most).

In the ideal, games in the LittleBigPlanet series are more about level creation and playing the community levels than they are the story that introduces you to the mechanics of the game (LBP3 adding a few more to the mechanics from the other two).  The thing is, browsing for levels in this edition of the game wasn’t as fun to me as it might have been in the earlier versions, and not all of the community versions are all that well put together or interesting.

The game might be a bit more interesting if you can find three friends who like the gaming style and have the game to play the story levels together, and getting to the “100%” mark for most levels will require at least one other person, if not three.

So yeah … I could have gotten away with not playing this version, easy.  It was short, a little repetitive, and I found the story, while it did tie the levels together, somewhat unimaginative and tedious.

If there’s a 4, I’ll be waiting until I see it dirt cheap (even $20 might be too much) before picking it up.