Big Hops Review

Having followed the development of Big Hops for a while now, consistently being wowed by its emphasis on movement and player expression, as well as its dangerously charming cast of characters, it’s fair to say I had high expectations going into it as my first playthrough of this year. And while there are certainly aspects of the final work that I feel less enthused about, this is absolutely a game that should be on most folks’ radars as an early 2026 banger.

Big Hops’ titular hero is a young frog with a plucky attitude and a passion for bugs (as well as the eating of them). While out playing explorer with his sister, Hop is portal’d away by a mysterious kidnapper named Diss, who demands the adolescent amphibian join him on a quest to recover a supply of ‘Dark Drips’ from across the known realms. It’s an interesting kicking-off point, with Diss adamant that his motives are pure, despite the objectively evil act of holding a child against their will, but unwilling to explain himself beyond it.

This inexplicable, involuntary mission takes our fearless frog on a 15-hour journey through four unique(ly bizarre) worlds, each a sizeable and widely explorable space full of folks to meet, collectibles to collect, hidden challenge levels to overcome and – importantly – one of three airship parts that Hop hopes to use to get himself home without the need to fulfil Diss’ whims.

Each of the main worlds has its own variation on the plight of the downtrodden against some ruthless org, whether it’s a crime family, a big resource extraction company or a cult-ish faction (all represented by various animals, naturally). And your response to each one leads to distinctly different activities from stealth infiltrations to big machine operation, to a stint as a cliffside graffiti artist. But at the centre of everything you do is Hop’s enormous frog tongue, able to grab distant objects, operate wheels and levers, swing Hop across deadly gaps and eat all manner of food and food-adjacent items.

Big Hops’ platforming may seem inspired by the 3D adventures that defined the likes of the N64, but to suggest so would be reductive (and probably upset lead developer Chris Wade, who maintains that this game is not retro). Rather, it comes packing a parkour-inspired catalogue of movement that feels incredibly fresh and modern. Hop can wall run, dash in and out of jumps, use his tongue to swing, free climb à la Breath the Wild and even pick up serious speed by belly-surfing, and that’s all just his default moveset.

Further augmenting what Hop can do naturally, there’s a whole library of ‘Veggies’ that he can pick up and throw around to help navigate the environment. There are more than a dozen of these, ranging from mushrooms that act as bounce pads and acorns that grow climbable stalks to trippier stuff like anti-gravity berries. The beauty of these is that, while there’s usually a bushel of a particular Veggie nearby to pick to solve a nearby obstacle, Hop is also free to just stuff his backpack full of alternatives and use them however and wherever.

And as if that wasn’t enough, Trinkets earned through collecting those all-important Dark Drips can give Hop some incredibly handy buffs,  like extra health and stamina or more backpack storage for Veggies. You’ve got limited slots for these, so mixing them up to suit your particular playstyle adds some extra flavour.

It’s this ability for players to find their own creative solutions, complemented by the parkour system, Veggies, trinkets and the level layouts, that makes Big Hops shine. The game’s greatest trick is to make everything you do feel like it was your own, original idea, and it’s a feat of design that a 3D platformer supports such a breadth of approaches at almost every turn while maintaining some sense of direction. There’s also plenty of more ‘bespoke’ puzzle and traversal segments, all of which are as sharp and satisfying as the genre’s best, but it’s this almost immersive sim-esque feeling of agency that I adored. It’s no wonder the game ships with built-in speedrunning tools – I’m expecting some wild plays to come.

But while moving around in Big Hops feels astonishingly good when it all comes together as it should, it’s not without missteps. The camera – ever a challenge to be tackled in this particular flavour of video game – often fails to keep up with the action during death-defying maneuvers. I lost count of the times I needed to point my view precisely at a particular object on-screen to smack it with Hop’s tongue, only to hit the wrong one or miss it entirely because I couldn’t wrangle my view in time.

There are also plenty of moments where the game’s liberal approach to physics results in unexpected and undesirable outcomes. Weird collisions, odd behaviours, that sort of thing. I found an impressive number of different ways to accidentally clip through the environment and fall into the infinite abyss, including one time where I used the in-game camera to snap a selfie and the resulting flash sent Hop into the ground. Thing is, this stuff isn’t a deal-breaker by any stretch, with very forgiving checkpointing and the trade-off ultimately being the sense of freedom that’s so important to this game.

And while I’m no game designer, I do reckon that cutting Big Hops’ runtime down by a few hours might have helped. As it stands, the roughly 15-hour adventure tends to feel just a touch too long in some parts, especially by about the fifth time your progress through one of the main ‘worlds’ is gated by an NPC asking you to do or find exactly three of something. The finale, too, feels unnecessarily padded out, and I wonder if scoping it all in just a touch might have allowed for a tighter final product.

The flipside is that every single second that Hop spends exploring new worlds and meeting new folks is utterly drenched in charm. Hop himself is obviously adorable and objectively the best possible species for a platforming mascot, but both the art direction and writing on show here are sublime. Dialogue especially is excellent across the board, full of hilariously off-beat quips sprinkled with real, heartfelt moments – and all voice acted by a talented cast of SAG actors. It’s all as bizarre as it is earnest, and deeply funny. Props to Tom Dunkin’s score too, which is full of Big Bops and masterful use of thematic ambient sounds.

Unfortunately, sometimes, early access to a game means playing the least compelling version of it. My time with Big Hops came with nearly as much frustration as joy, thanks to the pre-launch PS5 build being, well, pretty rough. The studio has been quickly patching it up as release approaches (Author’s note: A new update actually dropped right as this review went live, though I have other review deadlines looming and won’t be able to check it out), but the list of issues I’ve faced has been long enough that I’m not overly confident in recommending folks pick it up on PlayStation if they have the choice of another platform.

Final Thoughts

Ignoring the issues, Big Hop is a blast, and looking past the troubles I was having there’s absolutely no doubt it’s got the sauce. However, part of reviewing games is calling it how it is, and the issues on PS5 left me wondering whether parts of my experience were intentional or not. That makes passing a considered judgment a difficult job, and it also means that I can’t, in good faith, slap as high a score on this review as I would’ve liked, without doing some speculation outside of what I personally played.

Thankfully, if you take the time to look past the numerical badge that comes as part of the task of publishing a video game review, and you’re reading this right now, I can be more helpful by being more direct:

Play the frog game. You will not regret it.

Reviewed on PS5 Pro // Review code supplied by publisher

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