Create review (Xbox 360)

The word "create" implies imagination and vision--qualities that the game called Create unfortunately doesn't possess. There is a certain inventiveness at its core, however. Create attempts to take the Rube Goldberg-style contraptions of The Incredible Machine and energize them with the community aspects of Little Big Planet. Yet the result is never more than mildly entertaining, pussyfooting around a few worthwhile ideas but never allowing them to blossom. Furthermore, the game's absolute failure to document and communicate important features undermines its supposedly family-friendly design. Some delightful puzzles might make it worth ignoring this halfway approach, but the tepid community features and lack of personality make this an unsatisfying package.

6284960Unlike the car, this puzzle isn't too much of a drag.None

Create is organized into floating island worlds, each representing a theme. There's a carnival level, a space level, an outdoorsy level, and so on--and each level presents a number of puzzles to be solved and unadorned terrain demanding to be decorated. Your goal is to earn a currency called sparks, which are earned by completing puzzles and decorating these islands with surface textures, stickers, flowers, and various objects like trees and vehicles. In turn, earning sparks unlocks more islands and puzzles, as well as new items to play around with. These items aren't necessarily for decorative purposes, however; many are used to solve Create's puzzles, which bear a close resemblance to those you might have seen in games like Crazy Machines and The Incredible Machine. In many puzzles, your goal is to guide an object to its destination, such as getting a rocket through a flaming hoop or using stone wheels to move a pointy obelisk toward the balloon that it must pop.

There are loads of puzzles to solve, the best of which give you access to your full inventory of puzzle items to perform these tasks. You get ramps that launch objects into the air, floating magnets that pull metal objects toward them, bales of hay, hot air balloons, temporary globs of glue, laser turrets, and dozens of other objects to place. You earn sparks for getting the object of your focus to touch power-ups, for keeping it in the air for extended periods, and so on. The puzzles are all about physics, so the most challenging puzzles require a lot of tweaking to get them to work just so. You might need to play with magnet placement, slightly adjust the direction a fan is blowing, or place that glue blob in a different spot. It's undeniably fun to test your own cleverness in the free-form puzzles that give you the freedom to explore the possibilities. Cars zoom across ramps, toast pops from toasters, balloons pop, and bouncy bumpers cause balls to jounce back and forth, all while your score multipliers flash on the screen. These moments provide a silly, appealing joy.

It's OK, make that carnival as disgustingly garish as you want it to be!

Unfortunately, more puzzles give you specific items to work with and therefore limit your creative freedom. The game attempts to ease you into its workings, but it isn't until you're halfway through that you are even remotely challenged. This slow ramping up of the difficulty leads to inevitable boredom, and the other puzzle types aren't interesting enough to invigorate the pace. This is particularly true of those that ask you to build vehicle-type contraptions using beams and wheels. The chance to build a rover of your own sounds fun at first, but the few parts you get to work with are far too limiting, and the solutions are easy to figure out.