LittleBigPlanet 2

Fired with a shoulder button and capable of sending out a delightful luminous rubber cord, the grapple's a visceral extension of the original game's "grab" manoeuvre, and it sends you bounding through the environments in a way that's far faster, looser, and more unpredictably hilarious. It turns you into a superhero or a superspy, and, seeing that you can use it to grab onto any nearby Sackboys, it turns you into a supergriefer too, as you tug them off precipices, or fling them into electrical spikes.

Spring pads are equally simple, equally transformative. Naturally, they make long jumps easier, but they also open a doorway to a world in which LittleBigPlanet is a pinball simulator, as you bounce and rebound around little wooden mazes, ricocheting off walls and ceilings, enemies and friends.

There are plenty more items like that on the way, apparently, but they're only the first wave of the kind of changes LitteBigPlanet 2 will be bringing with it. The things that Media Molecule is really interested in at this point are more far-reaching amendments: things that affect the NPCs and cinematics people can build, and something brilliant and new that currently goes by the misleadingly dull name of "direct control".

The NPC and cinematics bits are somewhat linked. Media Molecule acknowledges that, while many people liked making entirely mechanical characters to guide players through levels, all of those nuts, bolts, springs and brains could get a bit confusing. Those items will still be available, but you'll now also be able to select something called a Sackbot too.

Sackbots are fully-formed automaton Sackboys you can place within levels: just kit them out in costumes, resize them as you wish, and then dump them in by the dozen. A quick trip through the Tweak menu will allow you to assign AI behaviours, programming them to follow, flee, or patrol set areas. Combine that with old ideas like the ability to electrify any object in the game, and you can make them deadly foes as well as loyal helpers.

While you can make do with that simple handful of preset behaviours, you can also go deeper. This a trend that permeates LittleBigPlanet 2 in almost all of its aspects: quick and easy stuff for the casuals, more complex options for those who want to spend their time fiddling around with things. So, if you want something a bit more involved than the AI routines lurking in the Tweak menu, you can go back to a world of switches and wires to create much more ingenious Sackbot logic.

Even here, the developer has been rethinking things, however. Instead of slapping hundreds of switches and bolts onto the tiny surface area of an NPC, you can now simply stick on a new item called a microchip. Clicking on the microchip expands it into a circuit board, which is really a window onto a piece of virtual real estate that you can then fill with all your wires and bolts and sound effect speakers, programming in all the reactions you want without cluttering up the object itself.

Microchips aren't limited to Sackbots, of course, and besides sticking them to any in-game object you can share them freely with other players, meaning that, if you've stumbled on a great multi-form boss battle behaviour, you can give it to everyone you know.

Beyond patrolling, following, and fleeing, Sackbots have another option now tucked away on the Popit menu, too: acting. This one ties into LittleBigPlanet 2's improved cinematics suite. While the new game's bundled levels will have full voice-acting, players putting their own stuff together also benefit from more dynamic camera angles, multi-camera inter-cutting (this is done by wiring separate cameras together and fiddling around in the Popit a bit to tell them when to shift from one perspective to the next) and also by capturing performances from NPCs.