Hop is a little frog with big dreams. He wants to explore life outside his forest, and his call to adventure is rewarded with the unexpected ability to leapfrog between worlds and even dimensions. Luckshot Games, the developer and publisher of Big Hops, appears to be similarly ambitious, if this game is any indication. Big Hops is a modest 3D platformer that takes on some of the biggest in the industry, on their own turf, with confidence and poise. Even when it very occasionally falls just short, you can’t help but respect the pluck it took to aim so high. Big Hops is a game centered on joyous movement that should put Luckshot on players’ radars going forward.
From the very start, before Hop even leaves his homey little forest dwelling, you can sense Big Hops’ inspirations. Hop’s movement and (ahem) hops feel reminiscent of how Mario moves in Super Mario Odyssey, even including a belly slide that you can use to keep your forward momentum going. But on top of that, it layers in a few other elements. You can wall-run like in Prince of Persia or Titanfall. You can climb any wall a la Zelda: Breath of the Wild, complete with a stamina meter that determines how long you can cling to a surface. Your stretchy frog-tongue acts as a grapple to swing on hooks and grab handles, and it also makes it easy to grab things like bugs or fruits out of trees. It all feels so immediately natural, and part of the fun of Big Hops is learning how to connect your suite of movement options together.
Before long, Hop meets Diss, a strange extradimensional imp with a snarky attitude and questionable motivations. Diss spirits Hop away to The Void, a bridge between realms where gravity is strange and twisting upon itself. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the flexible gravity system of Super Mario Galaxy, as Hop made a jump and suddenly landed upside-down with a changed perspective, but by this time the natural movement felt so smooth that the shift was easy to navigate.
Diss tells Hop that he has to venture to various worlds to collect little globules of dark energy, which he calls Dark Drips, for reasons he refuses to explain. But in the very first world, Hop also finds a kindly mechanic who promises to build him an airship that will take him home if he gathers the correct parts. Diss tells him the Airship won’t matter if he doesn’t collect the Dark Drips, so Hop sets about doing both at once: collecting Dark Drips for Diss, while searching for Airship parts in the hopes he can circumvent being stuck in the imp’s service. But Hop, who wanted more than anything to explore beyond his forest, finds that once he’s out in the world, he just wants to get home to his family.
Each of the three worlds you visit has its own individual peoples and its own story, usually revolving around culture clashes: a rabbit family business that isn’t addressing a sinkhole that’s alarming citizens, or an otter-run oil pumping operation suffers an acrimonious split between its founders. These are endearing fables that each end up feeling somewhat resolved, but not entirely. That seems like an intentional choice, to show how conflicts sometimes don’t wrap up in a neat-and-tidy way. In what appears a less intentional choice, the overarching story with Diss and the Dark Drips speeds to a conclusion that loses the plot somewhat near the end, where I had trouble tracking exactly what was happening and why.
And so you navigate each world, finding little droplets of void energy along main paths and hidden in secret nooks, while also completing major quests for Airship parts. Aside from a couple of boss fights, there aren’t enemies to contend with, just platforming obstacles. Collecting a requisite number of Dark Drips lets you go to Diss and trade for trinkets that imbue you with extra abilities, such as reduced stamina requirements or friction on belly slides, compass indicators for various collectibles, shop discounts, and more. One even gives you total invincibility, permanently, at the cost of all of your trinket slots. It’s an extremely flexible system that lets you approach the world as you’d like. I only wished there were loadouts to make it easier to swap between them quickly.
Aside from the Dark Drips, the worlds have lots of other little collectibles to grab. Coins scattered in pots and around hidden corners can be exchanged for cosmetic outfits and items such as stamina potions, which give you a one-time boost to your stamina. You can get the same boost by eating bugs you find around the world, which comes with a cute little science lesson identifying a bug the first time you catch it. There’s even a shopkeeper who rewards you with unique items for finding lots of different species of bugs.
But the absolute best items are the various strange fruits and seeds you see growing on trees across the various worlds that can be utilized to aid your traversal. These power-ups start simply enough–an acorn picked from a tree and then tossed into the ground will quickly grow a towering vine that lets you climb up. But these only get more wild with subsequent fruits that you find, letting you summon bouncy bubbles, shift the gravity, explode certain walls, create a floating zero-G void zone, and more. And since you can grab these items and store them in your backpack for later, there aren’t strict guardrails on how you can use them. The only limitation is that you need an object or surface to toss the fruit against to activate it, so you can’t (for example) create an effect in mid-air. That slight limitation helps keep the mechanics in check, but for the most part you have total freedom. Often, Big Hops feels like you’re breaking the game and finding your own way, only to realize that Luckshot gave you that degree of freedom on purpose, and often knew how you’d use it.
That makes it slightly more disappointing, though, when the game briefly gets overly restrictive. In the third world in particular, there’s an extended segment with mine carts that feels slightly janky, and there is no obvious way to circumvent its more stringent requirements. It’s a minor blemish, but it helps to illustrate that Big Hops is at its best when it’s embracing freedom, and less successful when it feels, sometimes literally, on rails.
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For a smaller game, though, Big Hops has impressive production values. Hop and Diss themselves are great character designs, and the worlds generally look very impressive and vibrant. Many of the characters are fully voiced, with great performances that lend life and personality to the characters. There are brief moments you can sense its limitations–most characters don’t actually move and will instead just leave and then appear further down the path where you meet up with them, for example. But for the most part, its execution matches its ambitions.
Big Hops is a testament to how much fun can be had with simple ideas done well. Hop has a modest suite of moves, finely tuned, that string together in ways to make movement feel free-flowing and exuberant. On top of that strong foundation, it layers on flexibility making the worlds you explore feel like playgrounds for your creative thinking and platforming finesse. Altogether, the result is a delightful platformer, and the first great game of 2026.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
