Penny's Big Breakaway - Review

As a child of the 90s, I have a strong attachment to 3d platformers, so whenever a new one comes around, I am always keen to give it a go. When Penny’s Big Breakaway was announced and the developer were the folks behind the impressive Sonic Mania, I figured this had to be a good thing, sadly I was mistaken.

Now before I get into why I was not happy with the game, let us talk about the story, such as it is. You take on the role of Penny, an aspiring performer who does tricks with a yoyo and when she spots a sign for open auditions for the King, she decides she has to go for it. On her way to the castle, she comes across a mysterious string and upon touching it, it takes over her yoyo and brings it to life. Armed with this power, Penny pushes her way to the front of the insanely long line and makes her grand debut, but upon completing her act, the yoyo gets antsy and goes after the King, tearing off his clothes. Shamed, the King calls for her to be arrested, so Penny makes a break for it, with an army of penguins hot on her tail. All of that takes place within the opening cutscene and then story beats from that point on are few and far between. There are some boss fights that provide more content for the story, but you really don’t need it as the game is not a story driven experience.

The reason to jump in here is for the gameplay and this is where it failed, a lot. The games basic premise is that of older 3d platformers, but as this is made by the team behind Sonic Mania, there is a lot of influences here from that title. Each stage you are in has one main goal, reach the end, but there are two sets of sub-tasks that you can go for as well. The first is fairly simple, hidden somewhere in the stage are three hexagon shaped items, some of them you can see in the distance, others you have to take leaps of faith to get. The others are rewards for helping out the folks of the world with various tasks, like carrying a fresh battery to someone, collecting all the dropped donuts and so on. Across the various worlds and stages you will jump, double jump, flip, swing and otherwise run for your freedom as the penguins chase you down. There are a number of times when there are no flightless birds in sight, which means you can take a breath, but more often than not they are lurking nearby and once they have you in their sight, it’s on.

Penny is not someone who simply needs to run away, you can attack them to keep them off your back, by flicking your yoyo out. You can press a button to have it fly out ahead of you, or by flicking the right stick, have it shoot out in the direction you desire. I didn’t find myself engaging in combat all that frequently, outside of a few instances where I was trying to jump up to a ledge, but found myself being dogpiled on by the penguins. You can actually take a few of them on and it slows you down, but doesn’t really achieve much else, however too many and you get caught and its back to the checkpoint for you. I mentioned before that you can attack them, to keep them off you, but it doesn’t work like it does in most other games, they take a few hits to get rid of and even then you won’t get them all at once.

So why did I not like the game, simple, I was falling through platforms, unable to attack at times, dying without any sort of attack near me and even just fighting the camera. Let me start with the last one, you have no control over the camera, which means like old school Resident Evil and God of War, you are entirely dependent on where the game wants you to look. There were times when I would often find myself making a jump to a platform I had seen before, but the camera would not pan to look at it. The other annoying problem was that there were a lot of times when I would fall through the world, making a jump on to a platform only to then fall right through it. To be fair, it did happen in reverse once, when after attempting to make a jump, falling short and hoping a swing would get me there, I swung up through the platform. There were also numerous times, including in boss fights where I was just not able to get the yoyo to swing, more so when using the stick, so when you have to deflect an attack and you do the action, but nothing happens its pure frustration. The worst though was dying from nothing and I am not saying that it was a cheap shot or anything like that, but there were times that I just died, I even have a clip of one instance. I was in a boss fight and after clearing one section, I started to move onto the next and then I died, no warning, no attacks just death.

That actually leads me into the performance, as when I got that death, I honestly thought I had just missed something, so I went to watch the clip and was shocked that I had not. But when I went back into the game, it got stuck running at like 15 fps, it was horribly slow and only quitting out of the game entirely fixed it. It also happened after resuming a suspended game, which again only quitting out of the game fixed the issue. Outside of those few instances, performance was mostly decent, there was some pop in on enemies and platforms in the distance, but as the camera mostly stayed fairly close to Penny, it wasn’t something I saw all the time. When in motion Penny is smooth and if you can get the yoyo to flick out, it is also smooth and responded well. Visually, the game has a fun and simple design, I don’t mean its bad, but rather the simple nature of things allows you to focus on the action right around your character.

The games music score is perhaps one of the strongest elements and again feels like its drawing inspiration from the teams Sonic pedigree. Each stages has its own melody and with it comes the challenge of not stopping and bopping long, as some of them are quite enjoyable. Penny doesn’t speak, nor does the sentient yoyo, but some other characters do and of course there is a lot of text, but nothing ever felt like it was being overpowered audially.

Penny’s Big Breakaway is a game that I wanted to adore, it had all the right ingredients for a solid platformer, but as I was constantly falling through the platforms, it has failed in the most basic of ways. Each of the levels, minus giant penguin ball, are fun and the team have shown some wonderful level design and if you wanted to get everything, going back for a second round is just as fun as the first time. However the constant issues I faced, including randomly dying without any provocation means that its hard to justify anyone play this game. Now these issues could be down to platform, I was on the Xbox Series X, it could just be bad luck on my side, however they shouldn’t have happened at all. If you are someone who enjoyed Sonic Mania or 3d platformers, I can still suggest that you give this a go, just be aware that like any yoyo trick, its likely to result in a tangled mess.

The Score

7.0

Review code provided by Private Division

The Pros

Each level has a lot to enjoy and with multiple things to collect, should see you getting a lot from them

Penny is able to take full advantage of her yoyo, swinging, flipping and even riding it around

The Cons

The game has a lot of problems, the worst is platforms that see you fall through them

Performance issues are present and seem to trigger in weird ways and are a pain to fix