Just when I thought I’m not going to find another solid 3D platformer, along came my friend with a recommendation. “Dude, you gotta try Big Hops,” he said. “It’s everything you could want in a modern platformer,” is how he sold it to me. Now, I love me some indie platformers, but that sounded like some awfully high praise, you know? But, the game was only $20, so try it I did and, well, I’ll be. He was right! Big Hops is everything I want in a 3D platformer, and I’ll be it is for you too.

I’ll start by getting Big Hops’ one and only issue out of the way: it’s a bit on the short side. There are only three main worlds and it took me only about 20 hours to finish the story and collect everything on my first playthrough. That said, each of those worlds was a blast to explore and manage to walk the line between playing distinctly from one another while keeping the core gameplay loop intact.

Alright, now that that’s done, what exactly is going on in Big Hops. Well, you take hop into the role of Hops, a young frog who suddenly gets pulled out of his forest home and sent on an adventure to save reality (though he doesn’t learn that part ’till later). To accomplish this, he must travel across the worlds collecting Dark Drips. There’s 100 of them in the game and they’re obtained by finding them in the world, completing quests, clearing challenge rooms and by collecting enough Dark Drops to form one. If you’ve played Super Mario Odyssey, then you’ll have an idea of how this works.

Big Hops actually borrows the most important parts of Mario’s moveset from Odyssey too, namely his roll and dive jump. Both move function almost exactly the same, so they feel very natural to use. Hops has a couple of moves up on Nintendo’s plumber though. First, he can climb most surfaces for a brief time (like Link in BotW), wall run and use his tongue to do everything from manipulate switches to catching bugs, swinging from grapple points or even picking locks!

For how smoothly Hops controls, it’s really quite incredibe that this was made by a very small indie team at Luckshot Games. What’s even better is that the game is fully voice-acted! No bland sounds or silent text when talking to characters. Nope! Everyone has a little something to say, even background NPCs who are completely irrelevant to the story. It’s such a nice touch and really helps each world to really come alive. The music really helps in that too. It’s very “video gamey” background music that you’d expect in a 3D platformer, but its still great. The second world’s theme even outright slaps!

What’s more important than Hops’ moveset and even the overall feel of the worlds is what you get to do in them. Big Hops is always offering the player some sort of platforming challenge. Sometimes you gotta climb a tall cliff, other times you gotta cross a large gap and still other times you gotta find your way into a locked space. The game doesn’t offer any hand-holding for the most part and leaves solutions pretty open-ended. Basically, you’re able to use anything you have at your disposal to get the job done. Heck, you can even exploit the level geometry and movement systems. The game doesn’t care at all!

What you’re usually going to do, though, is use Big Hops’ wide variety of fruit and vegetable items to overcome each obstacle. Some, like mushrooms, make simple trampolines. Others, like cactus berries, create tightropes. There’s also sticky apples and balloon fruits among several others, and they all do something different. Some are powerful enough to entirely remove the difficulty from some challenges, but that’s part of the fun in Big Hops. If you thought to save a strong berry, then good on you for having it on you later.

Combine all this with a genuinely feel-good atmosphere and actually likable characters and you’re in for a great 20 hours or so. Seriously, I don’t think you can go wrong with Big Hops if you’re a 3D platformer enjoyer like I am. Do yourself a favor and give it a chance!

---

What’s an indie game that really surprised you lately? What kind of game was it?

Image from the Steam page