Penny’s Big Breakaway is a fast paced, momentum based 3D platformer
What Is It? Penny’s Big Breakaway is a bright, colorful 3D platformer that borrows a lot of the momentum and speed tendencies from Sonic. The Sonic connection makes a lot of sense as this game is the first from Evening Star, a company started by Christian Whitehead and other devs who worked on Sonic Mania. Penny’s Big Breakaway might have been a 3D Sonic title in another timeline.
As the titular Penny, you control your yo-yo by swinging and riding it. You are on your way to demonstrate your skills to appease the king, but things go terribly wrong and you soon find yourself on the run. Your adventure will take you through various worlds, each with multiple levels, and you will be trying to use your yo-yo to move as quickly as possible the whole way.
Your main moves are to ride or swing your yo-yo. Riding it will allow you to zip through downhill areas, building up big momentum to find some hidden areas off of a big ramp that inevitably awaits near the bottom of the hill. This is a fun mechanic that works well as long as you have enough hills to keep yourself going. You can also skid on top of water on your yo-yo, at least until your momentum dries up and you are out of luck.
Swinging your yo-yo will have different effects depending on if you are on the ground or airbourne. A group swing will take out surrounding enemies, break things, and generally cause melee-like damage. Swinging while in the air allows you to suspend the yo-yo in mid-air so you can swing off of it to, essentially, perform a double jump.
As you go through levels you will find some hidden areas and objects, all of which are optional and only serve to feed into your score. The levels have a nice variety, with each new world presenting a few new curveballs you need to overcome. At the end of each level you will be presented with a QTE-like experience to gain bonus points. Call me weird, but I very much enjoyed these. A few boss fights are thrown in to break up the pace, none are anything special.
The game looks nice with the bright color palette used. I spent about six hours in the game from start until the credits. There was certainly more to see than I did for completionists out there.
The Best Part: A mostly well made 3D platformer is always going to be welcome in my book. It’s more Go! Go! Go! than the platformers I typically enjoy, but I am open to any modern entries in the mostly forgotten genre.
The Worst Part: Most of the game controls well enough. I never felt like I had true mastery of my yo-yo, but I was able to get around well enough. There are, however, a few specific spots which were absolutely maddening due to poor controls. I don’t need to get into the details, but inconsistent and rarely used controls were to blame for these. I almost put the game down a few times.
The Verdict: My primary issue with Penny’s Big Breakaway is fitting given the origin of the development team as it is the exact same issue I have with every Sonic game I’ve tried to play: I seem incapable of ever going as fast as the game intends me to.
A few times each level there will be a really big ramp that is meant to propel you up to a higher area to move on to the next spot. I almost always found myself stuck at the bottom and having to find the slow, boring route of jumping on blocks or stairs. This wasn’t just for secrets, it was for progressing the game normally. I was thankful the game did provide alternate routes, but I was also disappointed that I was incapable of doing what the game clearly intended for me to do: blaze through these levels and fly off of these ramps at high speeds.
I was always the kid who found a really good boost spot in a 2D Sonic then promptly hit a wall, forcing me to spend the next few minutes trying to find a good spot to get my momentum back. Penny’s Big Breakaway was a nearly identical experience for me. The upshot of this is that people who didn’t have these issues in Sonic probably won’t have them here, so maybe there is a lot of fun to be had in the way of a 3D Sonic-clone. For me, however, Penny’s Big Breakaway was more miss than hit.
How to Play: PlayStation 5*, Xbox Series S/X, Nintendo Switch, PC
*console played on for this review
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