Big Hops Review: A 3D Platformer That Rivals Mario
▼ Summary
– Big Hops is a new 3D indie platformer praised for its excellent, joyful core movement and controls, which are fun even in basic scenarios.
– The player character, a frog named Hop, has a versatile tongue used for grappling, swinging, and interacting with objects, which is central to the gameplay.
– The game features special fruits with various effects, like creating bridges or grapple points, encouraging creative experimentation and exploration.
– It focuses almost entirely on platforming and puzzles with minimal combat, offering tense challenges but no traditional enemy fighting.
– The game is visually stunning with a cel-shaded style and great music, creating expansive, gorgeous worlds that reward player curiosity.
Finding a 3D platformer that feels fantastic to play is the true benchmark for the genre. The core movement, running, jumping, and climbing, needs to be inherently satisfying, even in a bare room. Big Hops, a new indie release on PS5, PC, and Switch, not only meets this standard but soars past it, delivering an experience that is an absolute joy to control while inviting constant experimentation.
You step into the webbed feet of Hop, a young and adventurous talking frog. During a forest hike with his sister, which serves as a brief and pleasant tutorial, Hop hears a mysterious call and is pulled into a strange dimension. His quest to gather the pieces needed to return home spans three distinct worlds, resulting in roughly eight hours of what might be some of the finest 3D platforming seen in years.
A Sticky Situation
Like any good platforming hero, Hop can jump, roll, dive, and climb. His secret weapon, however, is something Mario never had: an incredibly versatile, prehensile tongue. This single feature transforms Big Hops from a great game into a potential classic. The tongue allows Hop to grapple and swing across gaps with Spider-Man-like agility. It’s also used to interact with the world, opening chests, flipping switches, and even tackling a bizarrely inventive lock-picking mini-game. The implementation is so seamless that using the tongue quickly becomes as instinctive as jumping.
The developers have built clever puzzles and platforming sequences around this ability, ensuring it feels integral rather than tacked on. Yet, they wisely avoid over-reliance on it, using other elements to keep the expansive, semi-open worlds feeling fresh.
A Taste for the Unusual
Scattered throughout these vibrant lands, populated by characters like pirate otters, are strange fruits with magical properties. One fruit creates a rope bridge when thrown; another ignites objects on contact. A personal favorite is a green apple that sticks to surfaces, creating permanent grapple points. These items unlock tremendous creative potential, letting players perform sequences that feel cleverly subversive.
Remarkably, the game allows you to carry several of these fruits in an expandable backpack. This means you can bring a fire fruit or a trampoline fruit into areas where the developers might not have anticipated their use. Granting players this level of freedom is a bold design choice, and it pays off beautifully.
Together, the tongue and the fruit arsenal enable players to pull off spectacular feats. You might skip a tricky section or bypass a puzzle entirely through clever combination. The game consistently rewards this kind of experimentation. Venturing off the beaten path often reveals hidden coins or collectibles, a subtle nod from the developers for thinking outside the box.
Visuals and Performance
Exploring every nook and cranny is a delight, encouraged by the game’s stunning presentation. It features a crisp, cel-shaded art style bursting with color. On PS5, it runs at a mostly solid 60 frames per second, making the platforming feel responsive and fluid. The Void sections, with their eerie purple hues and impossibly twisting architecture, are a particular visual highlight. The soundtrack wonderfully captures the nostalgic spirit of classic PS1 and N64-era platformers.
A Focus on Fundamentals
Those wondering about combat will find little of it here. While a few bugs may give chase (and can be eaten for a stamina boost) and there are a handful of simple boss encounters, roughly ninety percent of the game is combat-free. The focus remains squarely on platforming, exploration, and puzzle-solving. Don’t mistake this for a purely cozy experience, however; the latter half introduces some genuinely tense and fast-paced platforming challenges. You just won’t be stomping on hundreds of generic enemies along the way.
Big Hops embodies the ideal modern 3D platformer. It leverages contemporary technology for large levels and detailed visuals while remembering the genre’s heart: the pure fun of navigating platforms and the satisfaction of mastering increasingly difficult jumps. It delivers this through a visually diverse adventure that rewards curiosity and creative use of its brilliant core mechanics. It’s a special game that other studios in the genre would do well to study.
(Source: Kotaku)
