Game: Plain Sight
Platform: PC/Steam
Publisher: Beatnik Games
Developer: Beatnik Games
Genre: Action
Price: $9.99
Pros: Exploding ninja robots are awesome
Cons: Everything else about the game
Review Copy Provided By Publisher
Any game about tiny ninja robots that fight each other to the death should be a sure fire way to keep me amused for hours on end. Unfortunately, that’s just not the case with Plain Sight.
The concept is rock solid. A bunch of tiny ninja robots get together and kick the tar out of one another by using their mighty ninja dash attacks. Once you’ve gotten a couple of kills, and racked up some energy, it’s time to go out like a real hero. By that I mean it’s time to blow yourself up in a fiery burst of doom. On paper, that concept sounds great, but Beatnik Games has implemented a good idea in a fairly poor way.
First, let me touch on the stuff I liked. The simple, smooth graphics and the mellow music provide a great sense of style. This isn’t a graphically intense game, but Beatnik Games did a great job of creating stylized characters and worlds without taxing the GPU. I’m also a big fan of the glowing lines that mark each player’s path through the map. This can make it much easier to find your enemy in a sparsely populated match.
While the concept is sound, and the visuals are amusing, Plain Sight gets most other things wrong. The camera is extremely twitchy. Twitchy to the point where it can, at times, be difficult to keep your ninja-bot facing the way you want him to. That’s all right though, because it’s extremely rare that you’ll actually see an enemy coming. More often than not, you’ll get creamed by an opponent that just seems to appear out of nowhere. As mentioned above, you can follow the glowing trail your enemies leave behind to get some idea of where they are, but this doesn’t really solve the problem entirely, as it’s easy enough to go soaring across the map at high speeds. If you’re moving fast enough, your enemy will never see you coming. That might feel pretty good when you’re on the giving end of an ass kicking, but on the receiving end, it’s a little harder to appreciate.
Most of the maps have some tight spots in them. Combined with the imprecise movement controls, these tight areas are a great place to get killed suddenly from behind. You can lessen the amount of dying in tight spaces you do by upgrading your character throughout the course of a match, but the only upgrade that really serves to keep you alive any longer is the shield. Upgrades to your running speed and jump are nice, but they don’t really make you feel like you’ve gained a competitive edge over your opponents.
Plain Sight starts out with some really solid concepts, and then drags them through the gutter until they’re no longer recognizable as “good concepts.” The game isn’t completely unplayable, but with so many awesome indie titles available right now, it’s hard to recommend Plain Sight. If a game about exploding robot ninjas can’t keep my attention, then you can be 100% certain that something went wrong in development.
Popularity: unranked [?]
