Growing up in the 90s meant growing up when 3D platformers ruled the gaming scene. Games like Super Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, Banjo Kazooie have all been such masterpieces that you can fire them up even now, 20 to 30 years later and still have a blast with them because the games are just timeless. When I saw Penny's Big Breakaway shadow dropped and that it was a 3D platformer from the makers of Sonic Mania I was immediately interested and seeing the trailer made me even more excited to play it and review it, but unfortunately, the bugs and wonkyness make this game just shy of being considered one of the greats.

In this game, Penny's story is fairly simple and kind of weird, like many platformer games, she happens to be an average nobody with some pretty good yo-yo skills. One day she sees a flyer which advertises a big talent tryout for King Eddie's famous gala, which can turn her into a star. Coincedently Penny also comes upon a "cosmic string" that makes her yo-yo twirling even better, but some accidents happen at the audition and she basically becomes a fugitive. So Penny has to use her new found sentient yo-yo and jump across different worlds and bosses to prove her innocence.

The story and its characters may be cute and fairly entertaining, but the gameplay is where Penny's Big Breakaway really shines. And it all involves tons of actobatic platform jumping and chaining together yo-yo tricks. In fact, Penny can't really do much more than run around and jump on her own. But her yo-yo can make her dash, go across ziplines, pull heavy things, spin around which is great for clearing enemies, grapple onto the yo-yo, even in mid-air to increase her momentum to make that super long jump and much more.

I must admit, the unique control system took me a while to get used to. I played the game on a controller so I had to use a compination of stick, trigger and button mashes to command the yo-yo through the combat encounters and dash-grapple-double jump moves. But with enough time spent in the game, and a lot of missed jumps and leaps off ledges, the controls just clicked and after a couple of hours I was seemingly jumping across open spaces with continuous stung together yo-yo moves.

For all you collectathons, every level has four different collectibles to go for, one is the most basic one which is - score, which counts how many yo-yo tricks you did, how you chained your yo-yo tricks together, how many enemies you defeated etc. Then you have the end where the higher you land the more stars you get. Also, every level has three quests you can pick up from NPCs scattered around the level, these quests can range from cutting the grass, to delivering a certain item, to being time limited to pick up certain things. And lastly you have the "hidden" collectibles which are usually off the main path and some need some really precision based platforming to get to.

Now, the bad things, first I'll go to the visuals, the game really doesn't show far objects well, whenever you're ziplining or you're in a high place looking at the rest of the level, the far away things are just incredibly blurry and you can count the pixels, I would understand if this was the case on low setting but even on the highest settings I didn't see a difference. The controls are pretty innovative when you get used to them, but that doesn't take away from the fact that sometimes, stringing combos together just doesn't work and you just die because the game didn't register that you pressed a certain button. And like most 3D platformers - the depth perception is incredibly bad in some situations where you just can't figure out where you character is going to fall. Several times I've also encountered a bug where, if you dash into a wall, you'll be stuck in it and the only way out is to restart the level.

Overall, I really do recommend this game if you're into 3D platformers, but maybe wait a month or two for the devs to hopefully fix some of the annoying issues because it really is promising and I can see myself replaying if most of the issues are fixes.

8/10