Platformines – As We Play

So, Platformines eh? Not a game I’d encountered before. I took a couple of minutes to look it up on the tinterweb before jumping in. The official Steam page describes it thusly:

Platformines is a unique 2D platformer packed with exploration, RPG and shooter elements, set in a vast 16-bit underground world! Customise your character, master all difficulty levels and literally jump to the top of the leaderboards to prove your skills!

Exploration, retro graphics, customization and leaderboards; I like that, Platformines. I like that a lot. A quick scan of the gaming press and it looked like I wasn’t the only one. Platformines was being mentioned in the same breath as Borderlands, Terraria and Spelunky; not bad company to be keeping at all. I’ll admit, by now, I was getting pretty excited to get my hands on the 2D loot-em-up so I fired up Steam and off I went…

The dance of the sugar plumb fairy played as I built the handsome 16-bit avatar that would be my link to the vast labyrinthine mines of Platformines. There are plenty of options here and I did spend a surprisingly long time making my little dude just right. Then, before I knew it, the world had been procedurally generated and I was ready to loot my way to victory.

The plot of Platformines is a simple one: you are trapped in a giant dungeon populated with not only strange monsters but also humans who are out for your blood (for some reason). You must rebuild the damaged Robodig which is your only means of escape. In order to repair the Robodig you need to explore the titular mines and find the coloured block shooting guns that are scattered around the place.

The game starts with you in the mini-hub world and a very short tutorial teaches you how to use your multi-jump capability (you can jump 5 times without touching down!), introduces you to the tip giving man and the store. You then teleport out into the mine with the mission of battling to the nearest block-shooting gun. Easy peasy!

The initial gameplay is pretty fun: you jump around the screen blasting bats, gun-toting goons and a menagerie of odd monsters. It starts off pretty easy but the closer you get to the gun, the more enemies start filling up the screen and the more traps appear to test your dexterity. The first hour will really scratch that loot-collecting itch as you get more hats, guns and gems to sell in the store. After this, you will have settled on a favorite hat and unlocked all four of the gun types and found a couple of block-shooting guns.

Unfortunately, I could pretty much end my musings here as the rest of the game offers very little that you haven’t seen in the first hour of gameplay. You get the same monsters, but they are a different colour so you know they are tougher; only you’re also tougher so they are pretty much as tough as they were at the start… The loot drops keep coming, but by now you’ll probably have a favorite hat so you’ll just sell all the new ones. You have all four gun types so you’ll switch in a more powerful one and sell the old ones; there’s no real character to them or variety to encourage experimentation.

All that you need to do now is get the last block gun and solve the simple puzzle to build the Robodig and you are the winner. You can then go back and do it all again: the mines are procedurally generated so you will get a whole new mine to play any time you like. The question is, will anything be different enough to tempt you back?

Areas for Development

• Multi-player; playing with or against friends would add some much needed longevity to Platformines.
• More variety in monsters as you progress rather than just re-skinning them, would make it feel like you were making progress rather than just doing the same things from start to finish.
• A bigger variety in guns and hats would make each loot drop more exciting, Borderlands did a great job in making each new gun different enough to be worth experimenting with rather than just picking the one that does the most damage.

Final Analysis

The first hour with Platformines is lots of fun, mastering the unique multi-jump and blasting your way through the hordes to fill your pockets with loot. Unfortunately, Platformines fails to deliver on the early promise and the samey nature of the game makes it more of a grind than it needs to be.

Technical Competency – 8/10

Graphic/Sound Quality – 7/10

Network Stability – N/A

Overall – 7/10

 

(These grades assess our playthrough, taking into consideration how many (if any) bugs were encountered, whether there were any interruptions in gameplay and the product’s final technical state. These scores, coupled with the Final Analysis and Areas for Development, are suggestions for future patches and updates which the developers could (and in our opinion, should) explore. These scores are separate to our DLC/Expansion Reviews but link into our Patch/Firmware Reviews.)

(These scores are not designed as a grading system to determine the entertainment value of a product and should not be treated as such.)

As we play offers the thought strands of the reviewer as they’re going through the game. This offers unique content for the reader so they can come to understand the conflicting feelings of the reviewer as they’re playing a game for the very first time. All feedback on this concept is welcome.