Sometimes they come back, and it should be said with this type of game that we were lucky enough to try. One of those platformers which, in style, is very reminiscent of those designed for Nintendo 64, with a thousand bonuses and objects to collect along the way. These elements, combined with the ultra-colorful graphics, connote Penny’s Big Breakaway, developed by Christian Whitehead and published by Private Division. We tried it on PC and we’ll tell you our impressions in this review!
Penny’s Big Breakaway: old fashioned, same old fun
The narrative idea behind the concept of this title could only be very simple. The protagonist Penny he wants at all costs to participate in the annual auditions of an artistic contest in the kingdom in which he lives, but his yo-yo accidentally hits the king, stripping him naked in front of everyone. Penny must escape for this reason, doing so through a series of levels full of enemies and objects to collect. The classic mega boss of the place is inevitable at the end of each world.
An easy and immediate concept, as anticipated, and which evidently steals the style of the first 3D platformers, and in certain aspects, graphic and technical, It looks like one of those nineties games. All we have to do is complete each level, trying to collect all the bolts and completing the requests of the kingdom’s population.
Without controller you are lost
The most interesting element of Penny’s Big Breakaway is dictated by its control system, based entirely on the use of the twin stick, despite being designed for PC. Through the stick we will be able to move our yo-yo in all directions, jump, float and perform very fast and satisfying movements. Even if not completely.
In fact, sometimes the commands turn out not only quite difficult to learn but, even worse, their responsiveness is random, sometimes even preventing us from reaching the checkpoint that awaits us a few meters away. These are little things that don’t completely ruin the experience, but which make it decidedly less refined than it could have been.
Graphics from times gone by
The results were better instead graphics department, where the colors are truly bright and creativity reigns supreme. In some respects, e for younger players, Penny’s Big Breakaway’s aesthetic might seem almost anachronistic, if not deliberately unaesthetic. For gamers of yesteryear, however, it’s a completely different story: it can only recall the titles of thirty years ago. Albeit with some flaws.
Probably this title needs further improvement patches, as we found it to have some flaws in some configurations, especially so as not to suffer slowdowns in loading and in the correct performance of the game engine. Good, but not flawless, too subtitle adaptation in Italian, not obvious, but not perfect either.
Penny’s Big Breakaway review
With less than ten hours of longevity for this indie platformer, Penny’s Big Breakaway is still a good platformer that gives us a few moments of joy, and for the older ones even moments of anachronistic nostalgia, in the face of a title that has all the flavor of the platformers of the past. Unfortunately, the technical sector and the performance of the game engine are not flawless, both in terms of loading and in the response to our inputs. Despite this, it is an affordable game, where the graphics win, but it is certainly not one of the best results achieved in the platform sector in recent timesespecially in the independent production sector.
