Jumping to Conclusions, in "Big Hops"

A review of "Big Hops", cracking the indie game collect-a-thon, dialing in game feel, and thoughts about character design in platformers.

Look at this little dude. How can you not love Hop? Very fun protagonist for one of these titles. I like this guy.

I hate to start a review like this, but I’ll just go ahead and say it. Big Hops is a decently good game. It is a game that has a lot of potential, and sometimes it hits marks that feel great, but sometimes it can be a tad middling. There is a better game here somewhere, and in some ways, I am still looking for it.

Which isn’t to say I don’t think it’s fun. It can be fun to play, and frequently it is. It has enough ideas to keep the adventure feeling fresh, and executes on a satisfying, at times, suite of traversal mechanics to navigate its levels. But I feel like the lack of precision in its gameplay, an interesting story marred by poor characterization of speaking NPCs throughout, with some of my least favorite level design in platformers that I can recall, and a myriad of technical bugs keep Big Hops from reaching the promised land of its genre, and by extension keep it from cracking the ‘indie platformer curse’. Now that we have some minor criticisms laid out, let’s talk about those before I skew a bit positive. I did have a good time with it, despite some major issues. Let’s start from minor to major, and then we will get some positives.

As a preamble, I think it’s important to lay out my premise. Indie developers, over the years, have attempted to crack the ‘indie platformer collect-a-thon’ over the years, to mixed success. At the mediocre end, you get a Yooka-Laylee, which has all the developer bona fides and artistic chops to give you the ‘feel’ of one of these games presentationally, but misses completely on the design and execution of the product. But on the better end, you have games like Tinykin, that pass every bar for quality set for it, and set a new standard themselves in doing so for the genre in the independent scene. I think I would grade it sort of like that, too. Tinykin is what you get with the best of these, and Yooka-Laylee is perhaps what you get as the lower end of the spectrum. Tinykin is amazing and does everything right for me. That’s why I grade it so highly and hold it in such high esteem. The collectibles are perfect, there aren’t a ton of them, it feels so good to move around in, and the story is light and fun while being pretty interesting to boot. Great game! There are other contenders for the title, too, I hear (I haven’t played A Hat in Time, for instance), but as it stands, for me, that's how I see the scale going. Big Hops is perhaps in the middle of this scale, skewing lower because of the issues I have, but the attempt they make is commendable. It’s important to line this out before we begin, I think. Now for some negatives…

Firstly, while not the point of a game like this, the story is presented as a larger factor than most platformers. It’s initially simple, but soon balloons out into an existentialist yarn about the cosmic apocalypse. Again, not new for the genre— save the universe games are a dime a dozen, after all. The narrative here is a bit more elaborate than I expected, and I think that while it’s a nice idea to add sophistication to a familiar exercise, the added complexity brings forth issues of scope and execution that I think Big Hops, as a game, isn’t capable of reaching. I know this sounds silly; it is a platformer, of course, but if they are reaching for an epic tale in their game, then I have to grade it on its merits.

Secondly, in tandem with the middling tale you take part in, I think the characters you encounter are not interesting, and their voice performances are low-grade at best. You have the occasional gem in there, but overall, the voice acting is pretty corny and bad for a lot of the game. Even the inclusion of Steve Blum, veteran industry voice actor (who most recognizably voices Wolverine in multiple X-Men projects, as well as legendary anime characters Spike Spiegel from Cowboy Bebop, and Mugen from Samurai Champloo), can’t save it. His character, Wett, might be the most interesting of the NPCs you encounter as well. All in all, the voice acting is a big miss for me, and the only reason I even bring it up is that you can tell that they attempted to include a lot of it. It’s a very ‘talky’ game for a platformer, which usually isn’t the genre that comes to mind for a verbose experience. I think that Luckshot Games just didn’t prioritize the right things in some ways, too, which may be a bit mean to say, but that’s just how I feel. On the topic of characters, that brings me to the main foil of Big Hops… Diss. Oh boy, he is a paragraph unto himself at least.

SO… I don’t wanna tee off on this guy, but Diss sucks. He’s a terrible character, has maybe the worst voice acting in the game, and boasts perhaps my least favorite design in the game and, by extension, any game. I detest this character. I can’t really put a finger on why I feel this way either. It seems mean-spirited, perhaps, but that’s just how I feel. He’s an unlikeable, ugly, asshole.

Here: I’m gonna throw in a screenshot of this idiot.

Okay… what the fuck is going on here? Everything about the way this guy looks puts me off. It’s also completely out of step with the uniformity of the rest of the cast of characters in Big Hops, where they are all anthropomorphic animal people who can talk. He is terrible in every way, and when the story wraps, you are expected to care about him in a way that I didn’t. They shoehorn an explanation for why he kidnaps you at the start of the game, and just like the main character Hop, I was annoyed and completely put off by Diss’s whole deal. He’s gotta be one of the worst characters I can remember in a video game. He is in it a lot, too. Diss is the main vendor for badges for your backpack (charms you equip to enable certain perks for traversal), and you have to engage with him constantly. Every time you show up, he goes: “What do you want, frog??” Like bitch, you have shit I need, quit asking! Again, it’s petty and dumb, my whole beef with this guy, but I just despise him. It’s incredibly juvenile, I know, and I am sure no one else reviewing this game will care. But his inclusion detracted from my experience, so yeah. Gotta be honest about stuff like this.

A couple more negatives have to do with the precision of the platforming, as well as some of the level design throughout. The array of mechanics at your disposal is ambitious for a platformer, I’ll admit. The main mechanics consist of wall-running, jumping, diving, and building up momentum (you can equip a charm to view how many miles-per-hour you’re going, which is fun), grappling with your frog tongue, and using consumable items to traverse the vertical spaces of the game’s levels throughout. Some good things and bad things here. The movement feels great pretty consistently, and the way it felt moment to moment kept me coming back to it for the duration. There is a great sense of speed once you get going, and chaining together traversal mechanics feels very good… until it doesn’t. This game is very glitchy, so sometimes things just don’t work the way they should.

There was a time early in my playthrough where I was tackling a side level to get a collectible, and the game asked me to wall-run repeatedly to finish it. So I attempted, got the proper momentum I needed, and executed the maneuver to do so. I got to the first running juncture: a set of wooden plank walls, staggered from left and right, leading to the next landing zone— and completely clipped through the geometry of the first set of walls. I was taken aback but said, “Ok, glitches happen… let’s go again.” So I went. Similar thing; I jumped onto the wall, but instead of going across it, I completely slid down and fell to my death. Falling in Big Hops is very forgiving, thank goodness, so tumbling from a platform only costs you half a heart for making a mistake, and you can eat snacks to regain health (for context, you receive a minimum of 3 hearts to start the adventure, so you are allowed 6 tries in the early game to attempt something with no health items). But still. The third time I attempted was more of the same. I was shocked. So I pulled the ‘emergency lever’, and quit out of the game on my Switch 2. I then booted it back up, attempted the challenge again, and it all went completely smoothly and without calamity.

That example I just gave is pretty unacceptable for a game like this. Breaking the cardinal sin of platformers is a sin above any other: you must make the base platforming functional. If you betray that, what do you have for your game? The story isn’t that great, and the characters aren’t awesome either. It had to be better going forward. For some time, it was, but this early encounter I had with the bugs in Big Hops left a sour taste in my mouth throughout my 11-hour journey, and I engaged with it cautiously after that.

More bugs came as I played, too. There are some water sections of the game where you are required to swim through them to reach the next section of the level. Sometimes, the water physics just wouldn’t work, and I would fall through the world to my death, yet again. I would dive into a body of water, and it wouldn’t react like water; it would react like a pit I was jumping into. Later in the game, there are water mechanics required for some puzzles that worked, but again, I was leery about engaging with them too, for fear of the game just breaking its own rules again. There were a couple of cutscene breaks as well, specifically in a minecart escape sequence towards the end of the game. I had to hard reset the game twice to get the game to trigger the next cutscene to further the level in that case.

Maybe the funniest one was in the final main level, Shattered Mountain, where I threw a sticky oil ball (an item you can use to grapple off of in the game) onto a swinging platform on a crane. When I did that, the physics of the platform broke completely, becoming subservient to the direction of the oil ball I had thrown onto it, and then got tied to the magnetism of the oil ball’s physics rather than the platform itself— causing the whole object to glitch violently in one direction and slowly rotate around its mooring. Had to reset the game again there. This one was amusing, sure, but these issues slowly mounted for me, even if it got a bit comical at times. The game is a technical mess in these moments (I didn’t even list all the technical issues I encountered here in their entirety), and at some points, it majorly deterred me from finishing it because of these progression blocks. It got very frustrating at times, and that’s a major mark against it, for me. I am pretty forgiving when it comes to technical aspects of games, but even these issues, comical at times though they may be, I cannot in good conscience excuse them.

Finally, let’s talk level design. 3 out of 4 of the main levels are pretty good. Shattered Mountain is perhaps the best of these on a puzzle level, and will illustrate a later point I have when it comes to execution on later ideas. One in particular, though, Duster Bluffs, is pretty mediocre. Every level relies on items to get through it, but I think Duster Bluffs is the one level that is the most open zone, the most empty feeling, and the worst of the bunch. The chief issue here with the level for me is not having direction on where to go, and being given poor tools once you do find the right path.

It’s a shame, too, because I can see the ambition here, for sure. It’s the first ‘real’ level you play in the game after a long-ish tutorial world, but it requires the most effort to engage with of any of the other levels. It’s also the longest, which makes the whole thing feel like a slog. It’s a desert-y area with a lot of canyons, mountains, and side paths to cross, and while it can be fun to just haul ass across the sand, getting anywhere in this level is a major pain in the ass. The goal is to reach a tall mountain, but finding exactly where to go to do this was a major pain in the ass, as the only way to orient yourself is the compass located at the top of your HUD. That’s another thing this game needs. It needs a minimap and a full 3D map, desperately. It’s especially egregious here because you never quite know where to go at any given time. I just think it’s not well-designed, and the time it took to get through it was not worth spending. Not just those issues, but Diss talks to you a lot here and explains nothing to you, which is another detriment to the level. This fucking guy. Listen… I am not a dumbass, and I don’t need my hand held, but I have played a lot of video games. You can give me some direction, and I will allow it, but giving me nothing is a knock against it in my book. I’ll take a little help!

Not executing on the longest portion of the game is a negative. In some ways, the early portions of the game feel less polished or well-designed than the later areas. It’s odd. You’d think it’d be the opposite: most games are at their best at the start, since most developers know most gamers don’t finish games and want to make it as ship-shape as possible to retain consumers. This game’s content could’ve used another quality pass, in my opinion, in terms of content, design, and polish. It’s encouraging, however, that the latter half of the game is genuinely great and consistently more polished, save for the issues I stated previously in those specific instances. Junktown is one of my favorite platforming levels I can remember, for instance. A lot of fun can be had here, especially in the later stuff. So, I know I have skewed negative, but that’s the gripes out of the way, both major and minor. Here are some positives!

While Junktown is great, and Shattered Mountain is perhaps the best level in the game when it comes to the light puzzles in the gameplay, the final stretch after the ‘big reveal’ with Diss (again, this is lame), is an awesome, white-knuckle speedrun though altered versions of 3 of the main worlds, and it’s great. Maybe the best part of the game, even. If they had more of this in the game, I would be far more positive about it, but sadly to say, it doesn’t. It’s a case of “too little, too late”, which bums me out. But to keep it on a positive note, everything in these little bite-sized obstacle courses works, plays well, and most of all, holds up under the weight of the tech. These later levels are more complex engagements, too, so it’s very odd that they run better when the early game has more issues.

Again, it feels like as the game went along, the devs got more proficient at making it, and decided what they wanted the game to be a little later than they should’ve. Maybe a sequel will be better if they take what they learned here and apply it to a new game. I wonder. Anyway, the later levels are cool, they play well, and these parts of the game even look pretty nice too, which I can’t say for much of the game because it’s an original Switch title. It’s a little blurry and choppy visually, at points, I will say. It could really use a Switch 2 version just for the technical issues alone.

So, yeah… Big Hops is a mixed bag. Even when I try to commend it for the stuff it does do well, it is perhaps so compromised in its design and makeup that I can’t fully recommend it, given the state it’s in. It’s a promising effort, though, and I think there is a better game here than what I played. If they fix some of the technical issues, it could be a much better time. I liken Big Hops to Messhof’s Wheel World last year. I reviewed it here as well. There, I mentioned that I wanted to like it more than I did, and that the technical issues kept me from fully enjoying it the way I wanted it to, even if the bones of a good game are ultimately there. It really bums me out. Big Hops is fun enough, does enough interesting things, and is short enough that I think if you see it on sale, you should check it out. Beware of very bad bugs here, in its current state. It marred my enjoyment of it, and even though there is a far better game beneath these issues, I don’t think I can give it a recommendation at this time. Here’s to hoping they fix these problems.

At times, I wanted to just jump to the end of the levels when I had these issues. Jumping to conclusions, we’ll say. I wish I didn’t feel that way about it. I wanted to enjoy it, but just didn’t fully. It’s a decent game and at times very good! I’d personally just wait for a sale if I were you, and you’ll enjoy the game more if you get it at a lower price. I usually say to support the devs, and I stand by this— but in this instance, maybe let them fix a few issues first before you throw your hard-earned simoleons their way. Big Hops, as it stands, should be a game you ‘wait and see’ on in my opinion. I hope what I said informs your purchase!

As Dave Dameshek says, “It’s been a thin slice of heaven.”