Killzone 2 seduced us with its phenomenal visuals and intense gameplay, but LittleBigPlanet is winning over our hearts with its charm. A dramatic shift from the slate of traditional games in Sony Computer Entertainment's first-party line up, the quirky little game has charm in spades; unsurprisingly, it has just as much gameplay too. We went hands-on with LittleBigPlanet this week and found it to be packed with new ideas, plenty of inventive features, and sheer style.

LittleBigPlanet is the ultimate sandbox game, giving you free reign to create platform-based levels and customize a character. Hundreds of items, textures, and functions will be packed into the game, allowing you to craft unique levels to play alone or share with others. You play as a living burlap sack doll, traipsing about levels filled with all manner of objects and obstacles. The first part of the game involves taking your character through a series of pre-made levels, while the other has you creating your own levels and sharing them through PlayStation Network.

Playing through the slate of pre-made single player levels is necessary mainly as a means to later building your own levels, since materials needed for constructing your own can only be found in this way. In total, there will be 12 different collectible materials including wood, metal, cardboard, Styrofoam, and sponge. By working through levels, you can collect materials and craft them into unique objects. Additionally, unlocking new items with which to tailor your burlap avatar is also done by working through the pre-made single player levels. For the sake of time, we were playing with a profile that had a large stockpile of materials in order to jump right into level design.

Creating a level is remarkably easy. You start by tapping the square button to bring up a menu housing four distinct options: character customization, object creation, sticker swag bag, and picker for moving and resizing objects already in the environment. Depending on what sort of items you've unlocked and your available materials, you can drop all sorts of different objects into a level: blocks, levers, gears, balls, etc.

Connecting multiple objects together is possible by using glue. For example, we created a fully functioning tank by gluing together cardboard shapes and spools of thread for wheels. Adding motorized gears to the thread spools, we enabled the tank to move on its own. Complex objects like this require a bit of thinking and imagination, but are well worth the effort. If you're eager to use such a complicated, multi-part object again, the game allows you to stamp it, essentially saving the item for replication at will. It's a nice feature that ensures you won't lose any cool creations.

What's amazing about creating objects on-the-fly is that they're physically realistic. As in the case of our tank, it moved according to its perceived gait. Depending on how much mass an object possesses, you can push and pull by holding down R1. We weren't capable of moving the tank on our own, for example; enlisting the help of two journalist also learning about the game, though, we were able to push the tank together and work our way collectively to the end of the level.

With local and online multiplayer, there's little chance LittleBigPlanet will lose its freshness. We didn't get the opportunity to hook up with other players online, but there were the two other journalists that joined us in the demonstration with their own characters. At any time, you'll be able to pop into an existing game and start playing with a maximum of three other people. Headsets will be supported enabling voice communication between online players.

LittleBigPlanet easily stands out as one of the most creative titles of the next-generation, not only in its whimsical style but also in the way it plans on fostering social interaction and sharing. Sony Computer Entertainment plans on rolling out a beta before the end of the year to prepare for a retail release in June of next year. You can bet we'll be on top of it, devouring every cute little morsel of new information on what could be a revolutionary game.