Bought this on PS5 as reviews recommended playing with 60fps, which the Switch version isn't capable of.
Only played the first level, and it's pretty good so far.
Only played the first level, and it's pretty good so far.
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Penny's Big Breakaway available now - $30 (PS4, Switch, PC, Xbox) [By Evening Star, developers of Sonic Mania]
- Thread starter --R
- Start date
Just wrapped up my first playthrough on Switch - all levels cleared including the globes, all hexagon coins and denizen mini-quests collected.
I had a really positive time with Penny's Big Breakaway, it scratches all the itches for things I love in a 3D platformer. It's clear that the game engine is going through growing pains, but I have to admire the developers' ambition and willingness to take a gamble on something fresh in a very tried-and-true genre.
It's cool to witness all the sources of inspiration this game draws from - Cappy mechanics from Odyssey, a THPS style combo chaining system, Jet Set Radio-esque busker inputs, and momentum and level design reminiscent of 2D Sonic but transposed into 3D. It strikes me as something Treasure would have put out had they produced more new games in the Xbox 360 era.
Personally speaking, I enjoyed PBB's conceit a lot more than A Hat In Time, which hewed much closer to the template of Super Mario Sunshine and Rare's 3D platformers than Sega's output.
That said, there's a couple key design choices I wish were made different: One being the end of level score tally that rewards you with concept art if you hit the target score. I wish this was more akin to DMC where the ranking is a function of both score and time - you can easily cheese the score tally by racking up a huge combo in an open area, then leisurely making your way through the rest of the stage after you hit the target. The game doesn't incentivise the player enough to maintain combos through large segments of the level.
I also wish the game allowed a comprehensive remapping of moves to any input on the controller. The spin move, done by spinning the analog stick, is critical for chaining combos but often mis-registers inputs since numerous other moves are all mapped on the stick. A button press would eliminate any input confusion like this.
Overall though, this is the kind of game I want to see more of in the industry. Smaller scope, gameplay-driven, fresh ideas, ~12 hours of content with tons of room for replayability. I'm glad to have supported the developers on this one, and I hope they stick around to make it even better in the months to come.
I had a really positive time with Penny's Big Breakaway, it scratches all the itches for things I love in a 3D platformer. It's clear that the game engine is going through growing pains, but I have to admire the developers' ambition and willingness to take a gamble on something fresh in a very tried-and-true genre.
It's cool to witness all the sources of inspiration this game draws from - Cappy mechanics from Odyssey, a THPS style combo chaining system, Jet Set Radio-esque busker inputs, and momentum and level design reminiscent of 2D Sonic but transposed into 3D. It strikes me as something Treasure would have put out had they produced more new games in the Xbox 360 era.
Personally speaking, I enjoyed PBB's conceit a lot more than A Hat In Time, which hewed much closer to the template of Super Mario Sunshine and Rare's 3D platformers than Sega's output.
That said, there's a couple key design choices I wish were made different: One being the end of level score tally that rewards you with concept art if you hit the target score. I wish this was more akin to DMC where the ranking is a function of both score and time - you can easily cheese the score tally by racking up a huge combo in an open area, then leisurely making your way through the rest of the stage after you hit the target. The game doesn't incentivise the player enough to maintain combos through large segments of the level.
I also wish the game allowed a comprehensive remapping of moves to any input on the controller. The spin move, done by spinning the analog stick, is critical for chaining combos but often mis-registers inputs since numerous other moves are all mapped on the stick. A button press would eliminate any input confusion like this.
Overall though, this is the kind of game I want to see more of in the industry. Smaller scope, gameplay-driven, fresh ideas, ~12 hours of content with tons of room for replayability. I'm glad to have supported the developers on this one, and I hope they stick around to make it even better in the months to come.
This. It just feels like an afterthought, which is a shame in a game that so heavily emphasizes score and stylishness. Getting a time bonus which really round out the scoring system.
I wish time attack mode had some sort ranked times + dev times to beat.
Big update just dropped with loads of fixes on PC, not sure if it's on console versions yet:
Penny's Big Breakaway v1.2 Patch Notes said:
Happy to see this. The time attack improvements and the ledge grab being more consistent are huge for me.
Edit: this is threadworthy imo.
I finally reached credits on this earlier today, though I've got to say my overall impressions haven't changed much from my posts in the thread a couple weeks ago. There are moments when the flow works and I see the fun, but it gets ripped away way too easily, way too often, and too many times for reasons that I feel were either entirely outside of my control or in ways that could have been very easily addressed if the team had just spent a bit more time polishing things for non-experts.
In fact, my experience of fighting the final boss offered kind of a perfect encapsulation of all my problems, wrapped up into one convenient package.
Ledge-grabs never felt consistent, you can immediately yo-yo out of a roll if you jump but if you roll off of a ramp or quarter-pipe and get into the air that way, you still have to hit jump before you can do anything else, trying to land into a yo-spin to keep a combo going often leads to it just doing the air-hold and you end up swinging into the ground, yo-yo's reach does not feel consistent between hitting or grabbing certain objects, there are collision issues from beginning to end, bosses are slow to fight and needlessly frustrating.....I just cannot say I had a good time playing. I can tell there's so much potential in it, but it needed more time and testing.
In fact, my experience of fighting the final boss offered kind of a perfect encapsulation of all my problems, wrapped up into one convenient package.
I first reached the final boss last night, and was pretty dismayed to find him bring back the "go streaking around the arena in random directions with instant directional pivots on reaching the stage edge" attack that Mr. Q already used, just for how weird and nonsensical it was to deal with and for the way it makes the camera constantly twist and sway around. Of course during this phase they also bring back the "health pickups spawn basically right on the boss and disappear near instantly so good luck collecting them" that's already in the other prior fights. Moving on to the next phase, the idea of riding the stream of penguins is cool, but wow it looked laughably bad, the distorted and pixelated penguin.png sliding around, asking you to ride the yo-yo along and dodge penguin boulders with a tilted track and a strange off-kilter camera angle, making it a bit tougher than it should have been to judge when the balls were safe to slip under or not (especially when balls you already passes were doing a GREAT job of getting in front of the camera and obscuring your view of the hazards yet to come). Anyway, made it past that, only to reach the end of the track and get sling-shotted beyond the platform to clip through and get stuck inside of the wall/entryway. There was no way to get out and no way to die, so I turned the game off.
Came back to it today and got beyond that part, only to be flung into a helicopter segment where, of course, you have to avoid shots while trying to grab coins and health pickups, except because there's no ground of any kind and the camera is fixed on your destination, there's no good way to gauge how close you are to contacting any of those things or how to readjust your position. Of course, dying during any of this part means going back and doing the entire fight over again. Finally got by that, made it to the bolt fully inserted into the top of the crown. Alright, it's already fully inside, so I need to unscrew it to remove it, right? Start to spin counter-clockwise in order to raise the bolt up, just like I've been doing throughout the entire game. Nothing happens. Weird. Okay I guess I need to screw it in even though it's already fully down? Spin clockwise...the bolt comes up and gets removed, totally backwards from literally every other bolt platform the game has ever presented before. I had to laugh, because the whole thing just felt so completely ridiculous to me by that point.
Came back to it today and got beyond that part, only to be flung into a helicopter segment where, of course, you have to avoid shots while trying to grab coins and health pickups, except because there's no ground of any kind and the camera is fixed on your destination, there's no good way to gauge how close you are to contacting any of those things or how to readjust your position. Of course, dying during any of this part means going back and doing the entire fight over again. Finally got by that, made it to the bolt fully inserted into the top of the crown. Alright, it's already fully inside, so I need to unscrew it to remove it, right? Start to spin counter-clockwise in order to raise the bolt up, just like I've been doing throughout the entire game. Nothing happens. Weird. Okay I guess I need to screw it in even though it's already fully down? Spin clockwise...the bolt comes up and gets removed, totally backwards from literally every other bolt platform the game has ever presented before. I had to laugh, because the whole thing just felt so completely ridiculous to me by that point.
Ledge-grabs never felt consistent, you can immediately yo-yo out of a roll if you jump but if you roll off of a ramp or quarter-pipe and get into the air that way, you still have to hit jump before you can do anything else, trying to land into a yo-spin to keep a combo going often leads to it just doing the air-hold and you end up swinging into the ground, yo-yo's reach does not feel consistent between hitting or grabbing certain objects, there are collision issues from beginning to end, bosses are slow to fight and needlessly frustrating.....I just cannot say I had a good time playing. I can tell there's so much potential in it, but it needed more time and testing.
One thing that bugs me a bit is some of the missions automatically trigger, and don't allow you to redo them unless you off yourself to restart from a checkpoint. Especially when they require a lot of speed and not being aware it's about to start sucks when you were exploring for something else.
Downloaded the update on Switch - performance mode felt a little worse to me than the default at first due to the frequent framerate dips, but if you go into the Switch system settings and change your TV resolution to 720p, the game runs at a solid 60 FPS while docked.
That's placebo. Changing the TV settings in the Switch system menu does literally nothing to the gane.
Started the game some days ago as it should be the kind of games I would love (3D platformers with fixed camera, with a 3D Sonic vibe). Tried numerous times to make a good run of 1:2 to get the target score. But, in every run, there is at least one time where I fall into the void and loose a life instantly, because when I want to throw my yoyo in mid-air to get the "double jump", I am confident my input is in the right direction, but instead the yoyo goes down and Penny immediately falls down. I'm sure it's me because I have seen tremendous speedrun videos on youtube, but there is something I just don't get and it's frustrating.
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Load into 1-1 with the TV Resolution set to 1080p and you can immediately see it's not running at 60 FPS, it'll hit that sometimes when there isn't much onscreen but the framerate is extremely inconsistent throughout the entire level. Change it to 720p and you won't find a single spot in the level that doesn't run at 60 FPS. Obviously this only works when docked and not while playing handheld, but it's absolutely not placebo.
I'm sorry, but this is just not how it works.
Changing the resolution in the Switch settings menu is not the same as changing the resolution in the options menu of a gane on PC. The game does not render in a different resolution on Switch with that, it doesn't make a game run better. It's literally not possible.
The fact that you're arguing this when it's something you can easily see with your own two eyes makes me assume you don't actually have the Switch version, so I went ahead and recorded a video for you.
1-1 when the Switch settings are at 720p:
View: https://streamable.com/e995ah
1-1 when the Switch settings are at 1080p:
View: https://streamable.com/znhb9j
Count the frames if you want, you can see in the 1080p clip when it switches from 30 FPS to 60 FPS roughly 10 seconds in because the performance is variable, whereas in the 720p clip it's a consistent 60 FPS. This is easily repeatable and happens every time. I'm not going to claim I know why it does that or that it works for any other Switch game, but it obviously works for Penny.
How do you know that it's "literally not possible"? Do you have access to a Nintendo Switch devkit? Do you know whether Nintendo's APIs let you read the resolution setting so that your game code can react to it? I'd say it probably does allow it. Whether devs choose to use that data for anything is another matter. Which is to say, Penny is probably the only game that bothers to do this. Or one of the very few if there are any other games at all.
And this proves beyond any doubt that Penny does use that data.
Thanks for the share, if you had an mClassic or Retrotink that 720p image should scale better to a 4K output too so it looks to be a very viable way to play.
I'll stick to PC though for my setup(beefy rig and ROG Ally), have the majority of the launch issues been ironed out yet?
I argued because there is no other game I know of doing this, so I didn't believe you. Performances can be very subjective and placebo is a thing after all.
Now you gave proof, it is facinating that a game is doing something with that console setting and I eat crow. Nothing to make a fuss about.
Weird why they don't put this into the game's option menu instead though.
No problem, I just wanted to make it clear that I wasn't talking nonsense. I saw a tweet from Christian Whitehead that said most of the game will run at 60 even without changing the resolution, it's just specifically Vanillatown and other levels with high geometric density that have drops. This workaround seems to fix that entirely so I also wonder why they didn't make it an option in-game. Hopefully it's something that'll come with the next patch.
It's really fascinating ... more games on Switch could use that feature ...
Getting back to this game and smashing through a few more levels with some nice combos, having lots of fun BUT I cant stand the checkpointing in this game... aside the fact you can miss them, its the whole "oh you fell off/game glitched and got kicked back to checkpoint" syndrome the game has... which can be pretty frequent depending on your playstyle (mine is trying to keep that combo going if I can). But between the glitches, controls and my own skill issues, it annoyingly happens more than Id like especially when surfing over certain surfaces, as sometimes things dont work right or I fly off the edge due to bad yo yo swinging on my part... Combo is lost, and I get pushed back... especially annoying on a stage like 4-2 where your then forced to do the last mission again (which sucks), Ive ended up flat out purposely dropping combos before checkpoints just in case... For lava especially, I feel Mario and Sonic both had this sorted decades ago - throw me back out of the pit so can try and self correct, damage me and drop my combo sure... but losing health, combo and getting kicked back to whatever the last active checkpoint is sorta sucks.
Otherwise, the game is terrific. Great music, usually decent controls and mechanics, and almost every stage bar one or two have been so fun to try and master, getting some amazing combos as I go (anytime Im hitting a 100+ combo is a good run!)
Otherwise, the game is terrific. Great music, usually decent controls and mechanics, and almost every stage bar one or two have been so fun to try and master, getting some amazing combos as I go (anytime Im hitting a 100+ combo is a good run!)
More time spent on the game, I reckon Im getting way better as most of my above complaints are (mainly) fading away. I think the game is legit excellent. I cant now routinely smash the 100K points barrier with a little skill, Ive gotten much better at landing longer combos and just better at controlling Penny in general.
World 5 (the waterpark) I think is really nice, a great concept and has some great level design, its world 6 that surprised me as I assumed it'd be a nightmare to land combos in, but thanks to the way the canon mechanic works, you can sorta just loop bits if you wanna extend combos. Worlds 7 and 8 have been really well handled as well, its definitely got a bit of a learning curve to it (assuming your trying to higher combos) but that really is all part of the fun/challenge for me. Hoping to have the game done this weekend if nothing gets in my way.
Also, while the bosses arent great by any means, I just wanna say Im glad they only seem to take 3 hits, and tend to only take a minute or two to defeat - its over nice and quick. That's how its done Sonic Superstars... no need to drag shit out for 10 minutes.
World 5 (the waterpark) I think is really nice, a great concept and has some great level design, its world 6 that surprised me as I assumed it'd be a nightmare to land combos in, but thanks to the way the canon mechanic works, you can sorta just loop bits if you wanna extend combos. Worlds 7 and 8 have been really well handled as well, its definitely got a bit of a learning curve to it (assuming your trying to higher combos) but that really is all part of the fun/challenge for me. Hoping to have the game done this weekend if nothing gets in my way.
Also, while the bosses arent great by any means, I just wanna say Im glad they only seem to take 3 hits, and tend to only take a minute or two to defeat - its over nice and quick. That's how its done Sonic Superstars... no need to drag shit out for 10 minutes.