Planet Hop Review

Planet Hop feels like a dare, which makes sense considering it’s the product of a 48-hour game jam competition. How stripped-down can a game possibly get while still technically succeeding? Or rather, at the end of the day, what’s really all that matters for fun? There’s hardly any meat to this game, but at least there’s no fat.

Developed using the theme of “connected worlds,” in Planet Hop players try to see how many times they can bounce a small orb between two larger orbs. At the start of each round, a little brown circle rests on a bigger yellow circle while another big yellow circle orbits them both. By tapping the screen players launch the brown circle, hoping its straight trajectory will collide with the orbiting yellow circle. If it doesn’t, try again. If it does, the camera then tracks the spinning yellow circle and players now have to launch off of it back to where they started from.

It’s a lot more straightforward in practice. In fact, it’s so straightforward that Planet Hop wastes no time ratcheting up the speed, difficulty, and pounding club music so that the game becomes a crazy, exciting, and brutal test of hand-eye coordination, not necessarily intelligence. Also, whenever the brown circle lands on the yellow one, the position it lands at actually shifts the orbital path. It’s super disorientating but it also keeps things looking fresh and dynamic. The game needs that kind of visual variety too, because otherwise it’s literally just three basic 3D spheres and a blank background. The game is so hyper-focused on its hook it leaves things like pleasant color choices by the wayside.

Planet Hop's presentation is nonexistent and there’s barely anything to its gameplay. But there’s no denying that what is here works. Players that approach it as the semi-experiment in twitch minimalism that it seems to be will find a quirky new way to kill time and chase high scores.