2024-03-07 00:13:32
Exit the blue hedgehog, make way for the Yo-Yo.
The latest Nintendo Partner Showcase brought a shadow that had already captured the imagination of fans of fast-paced platform games. The makers of the warmly received Sonic Mania replaced the blue hedgehog with a colorful Penny and her Yo-Yo. Penny is a street artist. Big dreams drive her to audition for the Emperor himself. Everything seems to be going wonderfully and his show is very appreciated by the Head of State. Unfortunately, a cross between his Yo-Yo and a space rope gives the toy a sentience with a huge appetite. The first victim is the Emperor himself, and such a crime is heavily punished. Penny and her awakened companion begin to escape the penguin army. The new work from Evening Star and Christian Whitehead (responsible for many Sonic titles) is a platform game full of good ideas. You will be pleasantly surprised at almost every step. The bosses of all acts are unique and require the proper approach, but even during natural progression there will often be a treat that makes you smile. This Yo-Yo opens up a lot of possibilities for us. Controlling the character itself has many spectacular features. You swing on it, ride it, fight, break walls, dash, and even screw in screws. Everything gives you the freedom to move through the next levels, and combining them in successful combinations will speed up your time and help you escape the penguins.
They are our main enemy at all levels. However, instead of lazily walking around and waiting to die (like most other platform games), their assumptions aim to slow us down and eventually catch up. They always attack in groups and attack the main character. If we don’t let go of them in time and their number overloads us (the counter is displayed above the heroine), we end the game and return to the checkpoint. We consider this to be a very fresh and pleasant design choice. They run along the highway and try to catch you in the net, they swarm through walls, they create a snowball effect. You can feel their desperation and fight for justice in the kingdom.
Was the game released too soon?
The mention of Sonic himself is not accidental, as many influences from this dynamic game can be felt here. The world of Penny’s Big Breakaway is designed to always offer several alternative routes, and pushes you to have deeper knowledge of the levels in order to improve the result. It is clear that the creators wanted competition between players. Placing the appropriate platforms and other jumps in the right place was essential here. This orientation has somewhat detracted from the appearance of the country of Macaroon itself. It may sound colorful, but we were far from enchanted. Everything is drenched in similar colors and even when a new act brought a slightly different environment, the difference was never very noticeable. Rather, everything is drenched in the familiar sauce until the very end. It curbs enthusiasm more effectively than penguins. And just as we consider Penny’s Big Breakaway to be a platform game full of brilliant ideas, there are many elements that suggest that the game was taken out of the oven too soon or that the rest is half-baked, depending. The gameplay and the feeling of control over the protagonist sounds like a difficult problem to overcome unfortunately.
The lack of a free camera during a dynamic trip hurts. The right analog gives us more control over our Yo-Yo (we flap in many directions), but anyone would be willing to trade it for a rotation of the view. Without it, we feel very stuck in a 3D environment. This will often be the result of a bad jump and not a lack of player skill. Especially when the shadow beneath the silhouette is so inconspicuous that it is extremely difficult to attend to our landing. This is all a result of Penny’s multitude of skills. It’s good that there are a lot of them, but somewhere everything got lost. The character may not follow and respond poorly to our commands. Burying most of Yo-Yo’s actions under the same button (depending on auto-targeting) is just a bad idea, and we felt like we mightn’t be too fast because the program wasn’t tracking everything just not. Note that the game is very light: only 2.8 GB.
VERDICT
There’s no denying that Penny hasn’t been perfected in many key aspects. Character control is fundamental in a platform game, and if we feel even a little imperfection there, we have a serious problem. Frustration is a bit out of place in Penny’s colorful adventure. A game that needs some adjustments so…
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#Pennys #Big #Breakaway #PlayStation
