Rock, Paper, Shotgun

By Quintin Smith on August 24th, 2010 at 5:55 pm.

Kieron and I got a bit worked up over indie robot-battler Plain Sight, and I’ve put a few of our choice quotes (as well as a video of the game) after the jump. What you need to know is that not only has the recent 1.2 patch added both persistent perks and hats (their words: “It worked for TF2, right?”), Plain Sight has just begun a three day Steam sale. It’s now available for $2.

$2. Two dollars. Or £1.60 for us UK types. Excuse me while I bang my forehead against the desk and start gurgling like a broken washing machine. That is no money for a hugely inventive, ice-cool and utterly beautiful multiplayer game (with bot support). You’d be some kind of robo-berk if you didn’t stop whatever you were doing to go and buy it right now.

So, Kieron said this:

In short: Top Gun with Samurai Robots.

And this:

The sensations which Plain Sight offered me aren’t mirrored significantly in any game I’ve ever played. It has grace. As mentioned earlier, it’s occasionally an awkward grace, but as I catapult around an impossible world, waiting for that targeting reticule to turn red it’s a grace that’s undeniable and irresistible.

Wheras I said this:

Understand that Plain Sight is a multiplayer indie game for PC, available on Steam, about murderous, explosive, acrobatic robots battling one another with katanas in a web of gravitational fields. It’s part flight sim, part Jedi Knight, part vertigo-inducing spectacle, part experiment and all risk-reward. What kind of a monster would go and break apart a game like that to say whether it’s worth buying? You might as well dissect a woman to determine that yes, she has healthy kidneys and firm, spongy lungs is therefore probably worth going out with.

And this:

There’s a CTF level in this game which is just two cassette tapes floating in space, their tape unreeled outwards in two twisting, winding footpaths. There’s another CTF level which is two opposing castles, and the flags are kept on tiny moons you can only reach by first climbing the castle and then leaping hard enough from the highest parapet that you make it more than 50% of the way and end up falling upwards towards the floating planetoid.

Oh, and I also said that it’s very important to play Plain Sight with your own music in the background. Not just because it’s a game that demands a score, but because it has a weird ability to suit any album.

Now, here’s that video.