Nelson Schneider's Game Review of Create

Hypocrisy, Thy Name is EA
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/26/11

“Create,” despite being a multi-platform title available on the PC, PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360, is the latest game to embrace Sony’s self-promoted design mentality of ‘Play, Create, Share,’ which was spearheaded by “LittleBigPlanet” and continued by “ModNation Racers.” This is quite ironic, as “Create” was… err… created by Electronic Arts, a publisher that has recently shown itself to support neither gameplay, nor creativity, nor sharing in any way. While I am not a huge puzzle game fan and flat-out hate physics, I have found myself enjoying the emerging sub-sub-genre of Physics Puzzles after several good experiences with free Internet Flash games and the Wii title, “Professor Heinz Wolff’s Gravity,” (“Gravity”) to which “Create” bears a striking resemblance. Ultimately, I took the plunge on the PS3 version of “Create” because I wanted a game with which to test out the functionality of the PlayStation Move motion controller and the low MSRP of $20 was small enough to take a risk.

Presentation
“Create” is an entirely un-ambitious game from a presentation standpoint. The graphics are all fully polygonal, but also bland and devoid of character. The objects used to solve the game’s puzzles are static in appearance while the backdrop stages upon which the puzzles are built can be customized by the player with a variety of textures.

The music and sound effects are also completely average. They get the job done in signaling in-game cues to the player and preventing the game from becoming a void of silence, but neither is outstanding or noteworthy.

Technically, “Create” has an amazing physics engine that allows solutions to replay exactly the same way each time, yet also reflecting minute changes. “Create” is not, however, without technical flaws, as the background music stutters constantly and frequently loops over itself resulting in a cacophony that is actually distracting. I don’t know if this problem is unique to the PS3 version of the game, but it really annoyed me.

Story
“Create” is the type of game that doesn’t require a story, and thankfully the developers realized this. Instead of pulling a “Scribblenauts” and throwing in a cartoony mascot character who must collect MacGuffins for no adequately-explained reason, “Create” doesn’t have any characters nor any motivators other than solving all of the puzzles. While there are collectable MacGuffins, in the form of Sparks, these have no narrative value and are simply handed out for completing objectives in the game.

“Create” also doesn’t have a real ending, per se. Instead, the game embraces the modern phenomenon of Trophy Whoring to let the player know when they are ‘done.’ It is a surprisingly easy game to ‘Platinum.’ However, true Trophy Whores should be warned that there are a few online Trophies in “Create” that will go away whenever EA decides it is no longer profitable to maintain the server (honestly, I’m surprised this hasn’t happened already!).

Gameplay
Imagine the level creator in “LittleBigPlanet.” Now take away Sackboy. The result would look nearly identical to “Create.” The game is essentially a Rube Goldberg Device Simulator, with 14 themed stages. Each of these stages is home to 10 different challenges that must be solved using a variety of the game’s 194 everyday (and not-so-everyday) objects and intuitive physics (no equations here, thank God!). Completing these challenges earns the player Sparks. Each Sparks unlocks an item (either usable or decorative) and successive stages remain locked until the player reached a specific Spark total.

Each of “Create’s” puzzles falls into one of four varieties. The first is Object Challenges, which place a key object in the stage and require the player to move it to a designated goal using a limited number and type of objects. Object challenges typically reward one or two Sparks for completion. Second are Pick-Up Party puzzles, which are just like Object Challenges, except each contains three Sparks that must be collected by hitting them with the key object during the course of solving the puzzle. Third are Contraption-O-Matic puzzles, which limit the player’s object pallet to five construction items (girders, two lengths of metal beam, wheel, and rivet), of which a limited number can be placed in combination. Each Contraption-O-Matic puzzle also has two par numbers. Solving these puzzles by using fewer objects than the two pars rewards more Sparks (one for solving it, two for the first par, and three for the second par, for a total of six). The final variety of puzzle in “Create” is the Scoretacular, which, like the Contraption-O-Matics, requires the player to hit certain benchmarks in order to earn extra sparks. In Scoretaculars, the player is given free rein to use any number of their unlocked objects to move the key object to the goal, with the additional objective of earning as high a score as possible in the process. While the number of objects that can be placed in a Scoretacular isn’t completely unlimited (there is a meter that appears when the stage is half-full that shows how much more junk can be crammed into the stage), I never felt crowded by these challenges. Points are awarded for touching new objects with the key object, flipping it, bouncing it, or remaining airborne. Earning points in rapid succession generates a multiplier (up to x99). Unfortunately, despite the large number of usable items in the game, only about 20 of them are actually useful.

In addition to the Sparks awarded for completing puzzles, each stage contains five Sparks that can only be earned by decorating the stage. These are obviously mean to be ‘gimme’ Sparks for players who have a hard time completing the puzzles, but the decorating is tedious and pointless. It’s nice to be able to customize things, yes, but each ‘Spark Chain’ requires specific decoration types to be placed in specific areas. I found it to be very UN-creative and annoying.

Aside from playing the game’s puzzles, it’s possible for players to create their own puzzles and share them with others online. While this is a great idea in theory, it only works in execution when a game is popular. I found the “Create” servers to be quite devoid of any good content, which is both unsurprising and disappointing.

As I mentioned in the introduction, I initially bough “Create” as a way to test out my PlayStation Move controller and see how it fared in comparison to the Wiimote (which I used to play “Gravity,” and found that it worked quite well). What I found was that the Move is not only a shameless rip-off of Nintendo’s controller, it’s half-baked as well. Using the Move made precision placement and rotation of game objects difficult and required me to hold my arm at an awkward angle. The Move also made it nearly impossible to control the game’s camera (which is otherwise quite well-behaved). Finally, the Move and the in-game pointer kept creeping out of alignment, with no shortcut button for re-calibrating the thing. After grumbling my way through the first two stages with the Move and Nav controller, I put them away and switched to a standard DualShock 3. Things immediately improved. For a game that is, essentially, an enhanced clone of a budget puzzle game (again, I’m referring to “Gravity”), screwing up the pointer controls just looks incompetent and puts egg on Sony’s face for making their motion controller frustrating to use.

Overall
“Create” is a great puzzle game, bogged-down by technical issues, bad motion controls, and EA. If Sony had managed to snag “Create” as a ‘Play, Create, Share’ exclusive and put some marketing behind it, I imagine the barren online community and Move issues would have gone away. As it is, “Create” is still worth its budget price and provides about 30 hours of solid physics puzzling that should please fans of “Gravity” as well as the inner child of anyone who ever played with dominos and matchbox cars.

Presentation: 3/5
Story: N/A
Gameplay: 4/5
Overall (not an average): 4/5