Okay, I almost never review a game that I haven't completed but I have so many strong feelings about Penny's Big Breakaway from my time spent playing it that I really want to get down on paper while I'm thinking about them.
The first time I heard about the game was through the Nintendo Direct showcase, where it was advertised as an 'easy to learn but hard to master' 3d platform game. This is just close enough to being true to not be false advertising, but only just so.
I'll admit - I'm far from 'good' at these sort of games, but I've played through all of A Hat in Time, Super Mario 3D World, and I've also played the Sonic games Christian Whitehead was involved in.
However, I have the experience to say with confidence, that the game is in no way 'easy to learn'. The game gives you a 5 minute tutorial on 7 different abilities you can do for base level movement and expects you to have mastered them by the end of it. I game-overed at least 6 times in the first world, and while I'm normally lenient on games that ask a lot of the player, Penny is asking for too much.
Penny also suffers from a case of "who is this game for?"-syndrome. My best guess is that it's for the speed-running community, and people who have already played and beaten Penny's Big Breakaway.
If I tried to go fast (like the game is marketed), I'd game over because of the difficulty curve. If I tried to take it slow and safe, I might live and get through the level, but the game would constantly put sequences in my way that would say "Oh boy do this in 5 seconds and get a shiny thing! Go Go Go!".
No matter what I did, I felt like I was playing it wrong.
I'm not hyperbolizing on the time there either. The game will put dialog on screen saying you need to do something in 5 seconds, but by the time you're done reading the text, 3 seconds have passed and you don't even know what you're looking for. So you either replay the level out of frustration, or you just ignore all rewards and try to beat the level as best you can.
Fun fact: Did you know that while Penny is riding on top of her Yo-Yo that she can drift like in Mario-Kart if you press the trigger buttons? Well if you didn't, it's not your fault, because I only learned that she can do that when I went back and watched the Nintendo Direct trailer again. If they tell you that in game, I sure didn't get the message.
The ship boss was a complete mess and I basically had to shelve the game right then and there. On multiple different attempts the camera bugged out and put me 30 miles away from the action. On one attempt I was sent slowly ascending into the great beyond and had to reset. The speed boosts are finnicky as hell, and if you jump through them instead of riding through them you'll wipe out - it's extremely unintuitive.
But besides that, it's also just a poorly designed fight? Jumping up to the different sections of the ship was really weird - like you had JUST enough height to make the first jump from the lower deck to the middle, and then the pole vault doesn't even actually put you on the third floor of the ship. It just sends you adjacent to it? Like yeah I get it, I can just jump-roll out of it to get on top, but it doesn't feel right. It was buggy as hell and not a good look for any further content.
So at the end of my time with it I just got this feeling that the only way I was going to actually enjoy playing Penny's Big Breakaway --- was if I beat Penny's Big Breakaway first. That the only way to truly experience the game, was to already be a master at it, and honestly I just don't have the heart to push myself through 7 more worlds to find out what I'm missing. I might return to it later, but for now, play at your own risk - especially with the bugs.
The first time I heard about the game was through the Nintendo Direct showcase, where it was advertised as an 'easy to learn but hard to master' 3d platform game. This is just close enough to being true to not be false advertising, but only just so.
I'll admit - I'm far from 'good' at these sort of games, but I've played through all of A Hat in Time, Super Mario 3D World, and I've also played the Sonic games Christian Whitehead was involved in.
However, I have the experience to say with confidence, that the game is in no way 'easy to learn'. The game gives you a 5 minute tutorial on 7 different abilities you can do for base level movement and expects you to have mastered them by the end of it. I game-overed at least 6 times in the first world, and while I'm normally lenient on games that ask a lot of the player, Penny is asking for too much.
Penny also suffers from a case of "who is this game for?"-syndrome. My best guess is that it's for the speed-running community, and people who have already played and beaten Penny's Big Breakaway.
If I tried to go fast (like the game is marketed), I'd game over because of the difficulty curve. If I tried to take it slow and safe, I might live and get through the level, but the game would constantly put sequences in my way that would say "Oh boy do this in 5 seconds and get a shiny thing! Go Go Go!".
No matter what I did, I felt like I was playing it wrong.
I'm not hyperbolizing on the time there either. The game will put dialog on screen saying you need to do something in 5 seconds, but by the time you're done reading the text, 3 seconds have passed and you don't even know what you're looking for. So you either replay the level out of frustration, or you just ignore all rewards and try to beat the level as best you can.
Fun fact: Did you know that while Penny is riding on top of her Yo-Yo that she can drift like in Mario-Kart if you press the trigger buttons? Well if you didn't, it's not your fault, because I only learned that she can do that when I went back and watched the Nintendo Direct trailer again. If they tell you that in game, I sure didn't get the message.
The ship boss was a complete mess and I basically had to shelve the game right then and there. On multiple different attempts the camera bugged out and put me 30 miles away from the action. On one attempt I was sent slowly ascending into the great beyond and had to reset. The speed boosts are finnicky as hell, and if you jump through them instead of riding through them you'll wipe out - it's extremely unintuitive.
But besides that, it's also just a poorly designed fight? Jumping up to the different sections of the ship was really weird - like you had JUST enough height to make the first jump from the lower deck to the middle, and then the pole vault doesn't even actually put you on the third floor of the ship. It just sends you adjacent to it? Like yeah I get it, I can just jump-roll out of it to get on top, but it doesn't feel right. It was buggy as hell and not a good look for any further content.
So at the end of my time with it I just got this feeling that the only way I was going to actually enjoy playing Penny's Big Breakaway --- was if I beat Penny's Big Breakaway first. That the only way to truly experience the game, was to already be a master at it, and honestly I just don't have the heart to push myself through 7 more worlds to find out what I'm missing. I might return to it later, but for now, play at your own risk - especially with the bugs.
MyGameOpinions
2 months ago