Hands-on | Plain Sight

Format: PC/PS3/Wii | Genre: Multiplayer action | Publisher: Beatnik Games | Developer: Beatnik Games | ETA: 22/03/10 (PC) Q1 2011 (consoles)

It’s ironic that I’m en route to preview a multiplayer game called Plain Sight, and for the life of me I cannot find where I’m supposed to be going. I’m late, though, and irony doesn’t help matters. One embarrassing phone call later, I’m taken up to the fourth floor of a building I passed ten minutes ago.

There I meet the Beatnik Games team, tucked away in a small London office and hard at work on its debut title. And that’s been the last two years in a nutshell for this young indie studio.

Over that time, Plain Sight has seen major design shifts, a crippled open beta launch thanks to a server crash caused by linkage from a major gaming blog – think before you link – and a delayed launch after the team was commissioned by Channel 4 bods to work on a separate project. Now its PC release is finally approaching, with PSN and WiiWare releases early next year. Will the long slog reap the rewards?

It’s really hard to believe otherwise, and maybe you’ll agree as I explain the premise. First off,  you play as a ninja robot. Which is cool enough. You’re also a kamikaze ninja robot who’s intent on taking down all other ninja robots with him – cool also. Add all of this to eccentric art direction, flaming katanas, and the ability to a-splode yourself on demand, and you’re surely talking some fried gold.

Don’t be confused; the general concept is simple. The main mode is deathmatch. Most points wins. To get points you kill other players, this typically achieved by launching yourself at them Hayabusa-style with said katana. Chain the frags and you get more points for each one, and the stronger your ninja robot becomes. But those points don’t count until you bank them, and this presents a problem because the more points you get, the bigger your ninja robot becomes and the more noticeable (with warmer hues) his colourful trail also becomes. Hence the name of the game.

Therein lies the balance; accumulate points worth banking against the risk of losing them all, a bit like The Weakest Link. The kicker, though, is how you bank. No, not by saying ‘bank’, but by exploding yourself in a big ball of energy. Doing so not only banks valuable points, but also adds more if you ensnare others into the field of destruction. Which, by the way, gets bigger with the more chained frags you have. So you bank via suicide, a design choice that could only improve that banal BBC 2 nonsense.

It’s a refreshing twist on gaming’s most prominent form of multiplayer. It’s also pretty hilarious in a mindlessly charming kind of way, something that’s visible in the game’s presentation, from the odd mix of ninja robot combat and upbeat jazz in the game’s trailer to the actual visuals themselves.

Firstly, there’s the robots themselves, who jump around supplely yet waddle clumsily along the ground. Then there’s the backdrop to the battles, a giant, mechanical planet-like structure with its own gravitational pull, Super Mario Galaxy-style. Galaxy’s visual vibrancy is a cited influence and it shows, from the colourful trails of the robots as they roam across a map that’s like a toddler’s deranged Lego construction, to the way the camera elegantly sticks to just behind your mechanized avatar. I watch a robot launch into the indigo hue of the starry sky, land on a block which lights up blue to his touch, then explode into an immense white orb.  There’s certainly charm to this quirky, Galaxy-lite aesthetic.

ALL IN THE BALANCE
Then I’m reminded of Unreal Tournament’s space-based, low-gravity map, and from there I think of how Plain Sight is like a brisk shooter, except without shooting. There’s a fair pace to proceedings, even with just a few players rather than the proclaimed maximum of 20. With the full roster, things are sure to get frenetic. It also plays out like a shooter in a way because of the katana attack, activated by locking onto another player via the cursor. This takes a fair bit of skill, especially from the third-person perspective and with smaller enemies to attack, let alone actually unleashing it at the right time.

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