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Create Review
While EA Bright Light positioned its puzzle game Create as a sandbox for imagination and toolset for ingenuity, I often felt uninspired and outright frustrated while playing. Given that LittleBigPlanet nearly perfected this type of experience already, my largest qualms are not conceptual, but mechanical.
Most of the puzzle challenges are solved through repetition rather than resourcefulness. These bouts of trial and error require you to set up scenarios and tweak contraptions until the stars align and you fulfill a bizarre completion clause. In one instance, I spent a half hour slowly repositioning a ball so that it would hit a toaster with just enough force to vault some burnt bread at the perfect trajectory to land on a plate atop an in-motion vehicle.
While the physics are realistic and impressive, solving each puzzle is often a happy accident rather than a show of skill, a factor compounded by poor controls. I attempted nearly all the challenges using both Sony’s Move and a standard controller, and neither provided me with the precision needed to make minute manipulations to a ramp’s positioning or the angle of a fan. While using Move, I frequently found myself twisting my wrist at annoying angles to rotate and scale objects as needed.
The gameplay experience is also marred by long load times and an invasive user interface. Objective boxes often obscure the build area you need to access in order to solve a challenge. I also found myself referencing the manual repeatedly, trying to remember a path through unintuitive menus in order to access sky stickers, paint patterns, world objects, and more.
Completing challenges rewards you with unlockable items like wall clocks and lamps, which you can use to decorate the background of each unique challenge world. EA provides little incentive to adorn your stage, however, as the system of decorating simply feeds back into the other non-compelling mechanics.
I identify myself as a right-brain thinker, but instead of being inspired by EA Create, I felt my creativity restricted by flawed controls and frustrating challenges. If pushed and polished, Create could have been a rewarding experience. Instead, it feels like EA Bright Light needed some inspiration of its own.
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