Plain Sight

Was once a neat little game. Now it's abandonware.

Boring, dead, confusing and ugly.

They really should stop selling this game. It is completely and utterly dead.

This was the one of the very first games I purchased on the steam store way back when. It was the first game I bought as a gift(s) for friends.

This game deserved so much better. The multiplayer servers are completely dead, but It is worth the asking price if you can get you and some friends on it at a LAN party or set up a Hamachi system or something to play over the web.

[hr][/hr]It is a dead multiplayer game with no redeeming single player content. Game can still be experienced with bots or through LAN. However, without an active multiplayer community there is no reason to play this game anymore and it might as well be free to play title.
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Calicifer's reviews

Good Old Days

I remember a day when I first tried Plain Sight. I was amazed by mobility which characters had. Back then games were following same template where your character could not jump any more than few centimetres. It will be long before mainstream games would introduce any sort of verticality. In an environment such as this, it is no wonder that Plain Sight was unique, new and exciting to play. This game was one of the original games which I always regretted not playing more back then. After more than a decade, I came out to see how well it stood test of time.

The elephant in the room

It is dead. It had died long time ago which is not surprising for a multiplayer indie game. This is the major reason why I will be unable to recommend this game. It is dead product which you can only play against bots which are not the brightest bunch. Offline experience is not great. It is one of those games which actively gets better as there are more players in the match.

What had fascinated me back all those years

It is complete sense of freedom, verticality, ability to fly like a ninja robot you are. Combat which is quick and deadly. Unique visual style which is both minimalistic, but also manages to be pretty with high contrast colours.

Verticality

• In this game you can jump, dash and keep on gliding as long as you want and then as a hawk descend on your next victim. You can propel yourself with a basic dash move or with lock on attack.
  
  This is where problems start to arise. In this game maps can get huge. However, there is no active ability to move around. Running is relatively slow. Jumping even with maxed out stats are meant to gain an angle on which to lock on, on enemies. You can't actively move in this game which means that if you are stuck in a calm area or want to relocate yourself, you can't do this on bigger maps. Even on smaller maps, action can stop to a crawl if there is no fighting nearby and you didn't heavily invested into movement abilities. Just jumping through objects, getting over a corner can stall action to a crawl. Too much mobility is given on lock-on mechanism which works only when there are plenty of targets nearby.
  
  Combat
  
• While at first it is fun to fly around, destroying other robots, coming back to this game I had noticed that Plain Sight did not had enough depth in its mechanics to keep me engaged even back then.
  
  The problems start with a lock on. It is so casual friendly that you do not even need to aim, you will automatically lock on target and will be able to kill an enemy player. It is so easy to do that anyone can play this game well just by spamming left mouse button. Counterplay depth is a lot harder to pull of. In some modes this is so broken that mindlessly spamming your attack button is the best option. In Godzilla mode, your height messes up your targeting which allows you to lock on, on any nearby enemy. This means that you are just auto-killing all bots nearby.
  
  Auto lock mechanic in this game is one which actually feels like it should be last unlockable upgrade. Game does not have depth and thus it does not have longevity. It is a fun game for a while to fly with funny looking robots everywhere. You get bored quite quickly, because there are no mechanics to master in this game. It is all so simplistic, automatic. Player should be able to charge an attack and go in the direction it wants according to how long he had charged his attack. Upgrades would enchant this basic gameplay mechanic like being able to control direction in which you are going, be able to stop yourself in a middle of an attack, etc.
  

Malfunctioning Mechanics

Shields

• The problem with shield mechanic is that it is not given to a player by default. They require you to precisely time them, immobilise yourself and often window of opportunity is so small that player will not have time to react if he even sees attack coming. This mechanic also duplicates with simply attacking other player. It is a lot quicker, guaranteed and it may yield you a kill. If two players collide during an attack, they each block each other's strikes. Why this mechanic is here is a mystery.
  
  Upgrades
  
• Upgrades are plain boring most of a time. Like running speed increase which feels like it should be part of a base character. Mega perks are so hard to unlock that you need to do well in a match and you will be able to unlock one mega perk at the end of a game. Entire upgrade tree feels like missing opportunity. A lot of power is baked into default character which feels like it should be an upgrade. Most of the upgrades are plain boring, but some specific unlocks are a lot better than the others. It is disbalanced, boring and lacking a direction. It is a system which could not be in the game and nobody would shed a tear for its loss.
  
  Score system
  
• It is an interesting and unique way to evaluate players. It is fun and interactive. You know how squishy you are, you know that you are at risk of dying at any moment. You need to get close to an enemy, open up yourself to an attack in hopes of blowing them up with you. System is great and fun, however it is quite flawed.
  
  First of all, there is no way of scoring points without exploding and to explode you need quite a long killing streak or to steal that streak from someone else. Another issue is that in order to get points you need to catch players in your blast. The problem here is that any player acts as a multiplier. Given the difficulty in achieving this, game is all about one player getting a lucky detonation and him winning a first place with no way of coming back to this game. Game is decided just by sheer luck from one detonation.
  
  Furthermore, detonation in itself is visually unclear. You can't tell if player is exploding and you can dash right into it without you knowing what you are doing.
  
  Perk system
  
[*]This is something which seems broken in this game. There are 9 different perks which you can take, however they are never active. There doesn't seem an option to activate them. You just pick them, you have them on GUI and they do not do anything. Some of them would be pretty obvious like flaming swords, but I never saw them activated. This entire system seems to be broken from a get go, being either literally broken or so obtuse and rarely activated that it might as well not exist.

Plain Conclusion

Game was great at its time. Looking at it in 2022, game seems primitive. Some systems are either be broken or straight up do work. It could not survive long with a healthy multiplayer community, because its combat system is too primitive to offer anything more than a passing fancy. There is nothing here to master, there is nothing here which would give this game staying power.

Developer mentioned that they are slowly developing Plain Sight 2. If it wants to strike the lighting twice, they will need to do a lot more than release a remastered version of Plain Sight. They need a full remake, taking parts of what made Plain Sight 1 so appealing and heavily improving on its weak underlying fundamentals.

I LOVED this game, I ADORED this game. This game was seriously my favorite indie arena multiplayer. I recall hanging a unique point system. where the more points you had the more of a target you where.

I also heard in like 2018 that the servers got shut down but they are making a sequel. I've just noticed that the game is still for sale. But it's still listed as "Multiplayer", and the game features by where it says to buy. It doesn't say multiplayer or singleplayer. Just says achievements and leader boards. Plus in the about game, it says 13 multiplayer maps. Why doesn't Beatnik Game make it more obvious on the store page that MP is down, but still has SP?

I can't recommend a game in this state. I know it has SP, but MP is a 1000 times more fun. I really can't concerting that they also have been helping publish Gunjitsu since 2015. It's one of those games that never comes out of early access. and honestly I think Beatnik Games ran out of steam, and stopped caring.

An interesting title, a ninja-style assassin party game with Super Mario Galaxy styled physics. Unfortunately its gimmick gets old fast, there's no multiplayer community, so this gets relegated to the "Party games" category alongside "Gang Beasts"
...or I would say that if it had local splitscreen. But if it goes on sale and you have LAN parties, $5 for 4 copies isn't a bad deal.

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▀▄▀▄▀▄ Plain Sight ▄▀▄▀▄▀

What a shame, I had some fun with Plain Sight years ago. I was hoping to jump back in for a few matches but the Master Server for Online Multiplayer was shutdown this year. Since this can only be played in LAN, you could basically consider this dead. Granted, its almost 10 years since it came out and the server just went down this year, I'm just a little disappointed.

For those who didn't know, you play as robots who can 1-hit kill each other jumping around low-gravity planets. It sounds simple and it was, but it was fun to play. Goodbye Plain Sight, thanks for the memories.

Now here's a game that was piles of fun to play. The big problem it had was never becoming popular enough for a playerbase to accumulate and thus it was just about dead from the start. The AI modes still work fine and the game is still fun, but it's the kind of experience I'd save for LAN's.

OMG, after years the master-server is back up !!!

This was, when i remember correctly, the first game i bought (as a 4-pack) on steam after being forced to install and use steam because of Half Life 2. And it was a blast.

It takes a while to get behind this silly looking little thing and to understand the (3 times changes) mechanics. It looks sooooo simple but theres a lot more to it then just running around and hitting each other with a sword before comitting suicide in an esplosion to get the points. Its really fast, you need to get the timings right, know your movements to get rid of lock-ons, know how to repel, use the perks wisely ... Its really easy to just play but hard to master.

It had one of the most friendly comunity i´ve ever met in an online game with almonst no toxic players like we used to have today. A lot of the guys in my friendlist i´ve met through this game.

But ... it died after one and a half year. Then the master server died so nobody could login anyway ...
So now the masterserver is back, but no servers to find wich is really really sad for such a fun and exceptionally good designed take on a multiplayer title.

To the devs, if they read this. You have added joypad-support which is good for a third-person-title like this. You should consider adding a 4-player-splitscreen to this. It would really help to keep the game alive.
Everybody loves to get some friends on a couch, grab some beer and shout at each other while playing games. And this would fit perfekt. I´ve read something bout plainsight 2 which is great to hear, but don´t let this little gem die again.
And by the way the leaderboards died even earlier then the game itself ;) (not counting anymore)

So, now i have to activate some buddies to play this (after hosting a server ^^). In fact this is the only game that has me more addicted then rocket-league, which means A LOT!!

tldr: get it, lose a lot of matches while learning, love it, have fun

sorry for my bad english - but i think everybody gets the point

This game had a novel way of fighting, but the player base dwindled due to a lack of fufilling depth in the gameplay. The player jumps around gravity fields while locking on to targets to ram them. The exhilerating mechanic eventually falls flat. This fall could be due to needing gameplay adjustments such as altering character speed, time to kill, field of view, and similar design decisions that can be done with telemetry.

The game impliments overall level ups (like COD and other games do), temporary round purchases (similar to Counter Strike), and other such features. Unlike those games these features do not seem integral to the game feel and instead come off as layered on top to add complexity. A further in depth exploration of the root mechanics through a sequel or update might result in a more lasting community. The game could make the similar jump Rocket League made from its prequel. While it was worth a purchase originally, its currently hard to recommend an empty multiplayer game even though this one comes with bot support.

Used to be a good close-quarters combat game, but the activation server for multi-player is no longer running. LAN & single-player against bots still works.

This game is absolutely fantastic and it makes me very sad that it didn't get what it deserved. When it came out those many years ago I had so much fun playing online; the community was welcoming and the gameplay was great. I'm in a nostalgic mood today and that's why I wrote this. It's one of the best multiplayer games I've ever played and it didn't last very long...

This game is multi-play (or bot play) only; however, everytime I tried to play there wasn't anybody else online. I think its due to the fact that the game is interesting mechanics-wise, but there just isn't enough here to justify more than 20 minutes of play.

This is a very fun little game. Single player, the bots become a little too easy to mash, but the levels are fascinating, the mechanics of the game are innovative and different. The graphics are very simple, and ensure that you're not having that modern-game problem where you didn't see an enemy coming because of the foliage or mental textures.

The only thing I'm not overly keen on is the shallowness to the play. There doesn't appear to be any tactics, or good spots to learn, etc.. Wherever you are, and whatever you're doing, it all comes down to: Who can spin around and attack first. Because you spend so much time in freefall, and that the enemies have auto-lockon, it sometimes feels that it's just a click-fest.

That aside, it's whiled away many fun hours, and I've enjoyed all the levels (I think)... If you want to have a LAN party, and need something light to fill a while between heavier FPS sessions, this is a very fun little game.

Not a bad game for cheap :) Would have liked to see more maps but all in all a good game at a cheap price :)

This game is really cool, but the bots are too easy after only a short time playing. More people need to buy this game, so that it can be proprly fun. Who doesn't want to play a game about exploding ninja robots?

It's a great game if you can gather up some friends, almost guranteed to piss a few of them off :P

It has a great "Gravity" sort of mechanic that really makes the game its own.

Id gladly pay upward of ~20$ for this game, and at a dollar (At the time of writing this :P) its a steal.

I'll give it a 5/5 any day.

There are very few games on my large steam game library that I truly regret buying. This is one of them.

I will admit it is mostly personal preference, but I found the glitchy jumping around off of platforms and getting killed incredibly unenjoyable, with experienced players eviscerating me again and again. I played for an hour or so and never came back in the 5 or so years since I bought it.

Enjoyable if you like a simple multiplayer Joust-y experience I suppose, but I did not enjoy it.

This game is awesome and super fun. Sadly there is no multiplayer crowd left. So unless you are planning to have a super fun lan party then don't buy this game.

This game is AMAZING!

I know it sounds over enthusiastic, but seriously, it's frigging awesome.

You're playing as suicidal Ninja Robots that's fighting in space over getting the most energy.
The way you go about getting energy is by killing other people, and then blowing yourself up. When you blow yourself up, you gain however many points you've accumulated so far.

Does it sound awesome? Thought so..

Aside from the TDM, DM, Conquest and CTF gamemodes there's also stuff like: Botzilla. Where it's 1 botzilla vs everyone else. Botzilla is this huge robot with a flaming sword, no charge up time and has a lot of HP.

The only thing that's a little sad about this game is the fact that not enough people play it=/