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Plain Sight Review
More than a game of hit and miss.
Written by Andy Griffiths, 08 April 2010
What is £7.99 really worth? A few maps worth of DLC, a trip to the cinema and dinner tonight if you're lucky. To the modern gamer this price is frankly chump change and this is what makes Plain Sight even more unmissable. It isn't just good for an indie game, its glorious enough to challenge any other multiplayer title out there simply because it's ridiculously good fun.
Stars can give you energy without killing, but really this isn't a game for pacifists.The premise places you as a robot looking for energy and the only way to gain that precious resource is by killing enemies or collecting stars and cashing them in via a suicidal explosion. All of the action hinges on a simple lock-on mechanic, where players are continually chasing others pursuing their destruction via a swift dash of death. The fast paced combat is best summarised as a combative platformer with the one hit kill stylings of Quake, but rather than armed with a rail-gun, you have a samurai sword.
Follow the neon trail to find enemies.Matches take place in grey environments which change colour when players are in the vicinity, this supplemented with each players' neon trail culminates in a very vibrant and unique look for the game.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet the giant named Botzilla!Gravity is faithfully emulated in a manner akin to Mario Galaxy, as you'll often orbit platforms as their gravity well pulls you in. Bounding around maps is always a thrill due to the camera angle shifting in accordance with the movement of the mouse. It feels loose but in a gratifying way, enabling players to shift their movement quickly.
The shield can lead to some dramatic counter based battles.As you accumulate more points your size will increase and your motion trail will change colour, alerting others to the fact that you have multiple points to steal. This in-turn is counteracted by the fact that your self-destructive radius has also increased, resulting in a bigger explosion for others to get killed in your wake. The risk/reward system will make gamers think twice before killing themselves; would it be better to cash in the points now or continue the spree for a gradually increasing tally thanks to the escalating multiplier.
We aren't made of stars, but robots are.Throughout a single round your energy can be spent on improving your combat ability by adding a shield to block incoming attacks and an early warning system which indicates when someone is targeting you. These accessories prove increasingly handy and offer an immediate advantage. There isn't any kind of persistence between one match and another, but frankly you won't miss it.
Length of matches range from around ten to sixty minutes with gameplay shifting from slow to blisteringly fast as better abilities are gained. It's an interesting dynamic which rewards good players and adds a real sense of achievement when you take down those with more points. Tactics completely change as more abilities are unlocked allowing for more cerebral and less twitch-based play.
It would be easy to assume that once a momentum is established you'll often run away with the match, but in our experience this wasn't the case. Due to points only being registered after self annihilation, many combatants tend to accumulate massive totals before registering their hard work leaving cleverer players to swoop down, slice them up and steal their points. This results in matches constantly shifting back and forth, adding a layer of unpredictability.
Plain Sight is a game of contrasts, at first it seems like a simplistic multiplayer game with a few gimmicks and a funky look, but after an hour you begin to understand its genius. Occasionally bugs do come up such as players randomly getting stuck onto certain surfaces and rarely the game crashing but these are just quibbles with an otherwise excellent experience.
Sure it would be nice to be able to customise your robot and perhaps add a few new weapons into the mix, but this would threaten to ruin the purity of the experience. This is one of the surprise starlets of 2010 and as long servers stay populated Plain Sight will stay on your hard drive for many months to come.
Verdict: 90%
