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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.