QCF: Big Hops

he legacy of Super Mario Sunshine is such a polarizing 3D Mario game to look back it, and it isn’t an entry that’s often romanticized for its jumping physics either. At its core, Sunshine does have an admittedly solid foundation behind its snappier controls, which give the title a distinctive ebb and flow to its respective platforming mechanics, setting it apart from the other entries in the series. However, when that same series has some heavy hitters like Super Mario Odyssey and Super Mario 3D World, it starts to make sense why Super Mario Sunshine is widely considered to be at the bottom of that class too.

And yet—the entry still has its fans—one of whom felt inspired to recreate many of those quirky fundamentals from the Gamecube exclusive into a new 3D platforming adventure that would take influences from other contemporary titles, and blend them together with modern sensibilities to their design to create something that’s new yet familiar.

This game is Big Hops, and it comes from the mind of Chris Wade and his studio, Luckshot Games. After breaking onto the scene with their debut, Gang Beasts-inspired party game in 2018, Wade and his team hustled onto their next project and spent six years working on their sophomore release, Big Hops.

The end result is a charming, yet flawed, outing into an expansive open-world adventure that presents an interesting take on the theme of questioning what exactly makes an adventure so magical to experience—the destination or the journey. The message is poignant in its delivery and makes for a fun time, even if it occasionally stands at odds with the gameplay from time to time, as the game is more of a jaunt than a crusade.

As the scene sets in, players are quickly introduced to a naive yet incorrigibly endearing upstart of a protagonist named Hops the frog, who dreams of doing big things with his sister out in the forest. It didn’t take long for trouble to find the pair when a detour deep in the woods separates Hop from his sister, and he’s tricked into freeing a cosmic imp named Diss from a secret shrine that held him captive. The malicious sprite transports Hop great distances away from his family with the power of portal magic, and extorts the sorry amphibian into collecting strange objects known as Dark Drips for him on the promise that he’ll return him home. As frightened and angry from the situation as he is, Hop does come across a glimmer of hope in the form of an Airship Engineer he meets named Copper . The elder Raccoon tells Hop that he might be able to build a flying vessel that can help pilot him home, so long as he’s able to acquire the necessary parts for its build.

Naturally, Diss shows up to taunt Hop (like the total dick that he is) and not only mocks his go at trying to get an Airship back to his family, but also tries to manipulate Hop into believing that his abduction was destiny, giving him the chance to go on the “grand adventure” he’s always wanted to have.

The dilemma is certainly an intriguing angle to bait the hero into action as players are often conflicted with the question of whether not the Journey (Diss’s proposal) is more important than the destination back home with your mom and sister (Copper’s offer). This theme pours through multiple points of the plot, almost presented as if it were this diegetic angle at giving players a meaningful choice of objectives to pursue between gathering Dark Drips or looking for Airship parts. The reality, however, is that it just isn’t, and that’s where the cracks begin to show as Big Hops throws you into this big world to explore without giving you any real “carrot-on-the-stick” direction to press on towards.

As far as I could tell with my play through of the game, the Airship Parts are the McGuffin that keeps the game going, and the Dark Drip only exists to fuel a rather interesting, albeit unrealized, mechanic of the game that acts to enhance the gameplay experience and nothing more.

As players collect Dark Drips, Diss will offer Hop a choice of Trinkets to choose from, and act as equipable perks similar to badges from the Paper Mario series that the fleet-footed Polliwog can patch onto their backpack, with a maximum loadout of up to eight Trinkets at one time. Most of the trinkets offer minor enhancements to Hop like the ability for his wallet to earn extra interest coins every time he uses his tongue for an action, or an extra boost of momentum for the bell-slide move. Others are more passive upgrades that help with progression, such as various compass markers to Dark Drips, Airship Parts, or points of interest related to the aforementioned targets, or a speedometer to help better gauge a player’s velocity for more demanding jumps. These perks are neat, sure, and it is a nice change of pace to see the dumb item doodad unlock inherent abilities in you instead of gates to later levels, but the execution behind the idea is a bit perfunctory to say the least. There are times when you’re presented with some huge upgrades in the form of an extra health bar increments or a slot for Hop’s backpack that acts as the game’s inventory, and is especially useful for storing additional items to help you with certain puzzles or quests. We’ve seen this concept done by another recent contemporary, Donkey Kong Bananza, where the feature there felt a lot weightier to the experience and the potential it had to alter the overall gameplay. In Big Hops, though, these moments are genuinely too far in between all of the nonsensical bonuses to invest any real excitement in leveling your Drip total towards. Honestly, it took me around 30 Dark Drips before I was given access to a stamina upgrade, a trinket that could actually be a real difference maker.

"Is that all they do?" you may ask, and yup—that's all they do. 

Oh man, speaking of the Stamina meter—it’s bad, like, it’s the one flaw that ends up being the biggest fun-sucker in Big Hops.

Before I get to the nuances of why the Stamina system is just no good, I should get into the game feel of the game’s jumping mechanics and level design so that I can really establish just how much this flawed energy dynamic poo-poos all over them.

Mario has F.L.U.D.D. and Hop has his Tongue. The tastemaker has a lot of use in Big Hops.Moving Hop around is very free-flowing, like, the little dude has a responsive flow to his cardinal directions that reliably stop on a dime whenever you’re at a normal pace. Just like the portly Italian’s time in the Delphino Islands, Hop’s core skills are in the form of a jump, a crouch-jump for bigger heights, and a belly flop that’s only available when Hop is in motion. Unique to the frog, however, are some extra tricks like being able to hold onto items and throw them with the aid of an over-the-shoulder aiming perspective, and a move seemingly influenced by a completely unexpected source—a Ryu Hayabusa-ass wall run. Instead of a sentient water-pack however, Hop has a long elastic tongue that he spit out to grab unique items or grapple-holds in the environment that will impact his movement.  The unique items in question are different fruits or nuts, each has a function that can change up the dynamic of a platform-intensive puzzle, and admittedly offer the most innovation to the overall jumping design of Big Hops. Take, for example, a Mushroom that, when plucked and planted, will expand into a trampoline that can jettison Hop in the air, and can even act like a bumper-driven rail path that calls back to a certain speedy hedgehog if you plant them in just the right spots. Other items include a cactus fruit that can connect a bouncy tightrope between two vertical surfaces for some really Sunshine-coded shenanigans, a gooey bouncy ball that baton-launches Hop on contact, or a finicky Balloon that can be temporarily attached anywhere as a makeshift platform for trickier points of traversal. In a vacuum, these fundamentals often come together in a really satisfying way and make the locomotion of Big Hops super  fun to play around with. In spite of these cohesive moments, the joy soon comes crashing down to a halt the moment the design starts challenging you with odd bits of verticality to surpass that rely on a Breath of the Wild-like stamina meter.

On paper, this concept seems to always inspire this huge swathe of potential it can bring to the character movement of a platformer, but the idea is only as good as its execution, and it’s just not great here. See, the meter itself (represented in the form of a Lilly Pad and is just as adorable as that sounds) is divided into 12 pie-like quadrants, and these increments will aggressively deplete with any little movement you make when gripping onto a surface. This makes for several frustrating instances when the edge seems like it’s within arm’s reach to climb over and Hop is already gassed-out and scraping down the wall in an annoying descent back to square-one. Among the objects, there are power-up you can find like bugs and stamina juice, that can add up to 3 meters to burn through, and even then, the added energy can dwindle just as rapidly, and drains out faster than the fuel tank on a 1969 Dodge Challenger.

Using just the right items will greatly help deal with the janky stamina meter.Remember when I mentioned that useful trinket earlier—I was referring to “Grip Training +” perk. It’s here where I really began to despair as I thought this would be the game-changer I needed to turn everything around. When I put it and took for it a test-run, I was so disappointed—the boost felt so hollow in its execution that I suddenly felt like a hungry boy who cracked an egg open to make an omelet and helplessly watched nothing come out of it. This isn’t to say that there weren’t ways to work around this issue, as Hop can store those helpful platform power-ups I mentioned earlier in his inventory for future obstacles and puzzle, and when optimized, can really help mitigate any need to go full-alpine to the next ledge you’re trekking.

Some platforming jank aside, there were still instances where I was really zipping around the world, especially when I had a clear direction or goal to work towards. My disappointment is that, for as large as the real estate is in Big Hops’ level design, I wasn’t really given a lot of incentive to chase every nook and cranny the level had to offer. Each area has anywhere from two to four Dark Drips to earn from quests or puzzles, even though there are loads of other characters and cul-de-sacs to encounter when exploring its dense stages. Even more perplexing is that you’ll pick up different quests that seemingly hint at the reward being a Dark Drip, only to get a not-so-helpful game achievement out of the ordeal, which, like, is a cool Easter egg, but also doesn’t do much to help with the carrot-on-the-stick problem I mentioned earlier. Aside from the inconsistent direction, though, the real issue that compounds the drive to scurry about the worlds is the scope and size of the areas themselves. After the introductory tutorial area, there are three biomes to travel through, and in my opinion, the only one that has the best sense of rhythm between the critical path and the extra-curricular stuff was the second level. The first biome is a little too meandering, while the third one largely suffers from the verticality issues I previously mentioned.

It’s only when I started to take my adventure a little less seriously, and explore the giant levels with a more whimsical approach did I start to enjoy what Big Hops was laying down a lot more, especially with its gorgeous presentation.

Keeping consistent with the vibes of the Gamecube era it pays varying homage to, the game has a super-refined cel-shaded look to its visual style that really brings out the “Millennial Children’s Book” art style it emanates within its look. Everything from the characters to the environment animates smoothly under this paradigm, with little concession to the overall technical performance of the game. Mind you, this assessment came from playing the game on Steam with a rig that runs on 64GB RAM and a Geoforce RTX 3080, so there was some tooling around needed for the game to optimally perform the ambitious presentation it aspires to offer.

The sensory element that will undoubtedly stick with players is the incredible soundtrack, with a track list that’s filled with catchy tunes that’ll live inside of your eardrums for hours on end. What really makes the music stick to the experience is the juxtaposition in its instrumentation. Some beats will have heavy horn use in the track’s composition, then roll in some calypso drums, accordions, and a myriad of synthesized string work that really resonates with both the lackadaisical or perilous moods of the Big Hop’s tones.

I came into Big Hops with some big expectations after I first saw a glimpse of it, and while it does serve that meat-and-potatoes taste that I wanted to scarf down, those experiences made rare appearances throughout the course of its meal. Every eventful bite was sandwiched with a bunch of empty-calorie hors d'oeuvres   before the experience eventually presented me with some fine-ass Sirloin streak—at least the atmosphere of it all was really good.

Nonetheless, the package here is till pretty solid, I would just temper your expectations because the game isn’t the next breakout 3D platformer to break the mold—it’s still a good time though if you come out at it with a more cozy mindset though.