Download HD Video

Part of Plain Sight's charm is its simplicity. It doesn't take very long to learn this game, and the rules are easy. Players take the role of a robotic ninja with a large jump and a charge attack. You lock onto enemy targets by clicking the mouse button with a target is in sight, then try to ram it. Destroying an enemy steals away its energy and adds it to your own, increasing your ninjabot's size and power. After banking enough energy, players can self destruct to convert that energy into points. These points can be used for purchasing upgrades like shields, faster movement, or harder hits in addition to determining ranking. Although Plain Sight is easy to learn, the crazy level designs provide a great challenge.

The 3D arenas are wonderfully complex and create an excellent playground to battle on. At the same time, that's where things start to go a little downhill. Robots have magnetic boots, making it possible to walk on almost any surface on the map. Players are free to walk off the edge of an island and then walk along the bottom of it. The camera will automatically flip around and adjust to the changing perspective. Players are also free to leap from one from one floating object to another. When combined with the fast paced nature of the game, with opponents constantly leaping all over the place, and using a charge attack to get them, all the camera shifting can become quite disorienting. We generally aren't prone to motion sickness, but a single deathmatch session had us feeling dizzy and we were forced to stop playing. It's not that we weren't having fun, but we physically couldn't continue. The game could benefit from some sort of targeting reticule to help better lock on to targets and to give eyes something to focus on as the camera tilts and twists around. Playing in windowed mode and making frequent use of the Shift key, which automatically grounds the player to the nearest surface, helped a little but the developers really need to figure out a better solution.

Disorientation is our biggest problem with playing Plain Sight, but the game also has a few other oversights. Such as the inability to host a private, password protected, friends-only game, even though the server browser suggests that those features are on the way. Similarly, even though there's an option to search for LAN games, there's no way to set up a private network session. In a related matter, there's no way to play this game offline. All players have to create an account log into a master server browser and maintain an internet connection to play. On the bright side, the game comes with dedicated host software, but it's not yet as accessible or easy to use as the game itself.

Plain Sight also has a nice variety of game modes, including one called Ninja Ninja Botzilla, where a single player is blown to gigantic size, given a flaming sword and dressed in a Botzilla costume, and must fend off all the other players. Each time a Botzilla is taken down or self destructs, a new player becomes the target. Some sort of in-game voice chat system might have come in handy, considering the kind of coordination it takes to take out a powerful Botzilla. The same could be said for team deathmatch games. As of right now, players can type in to a chat box, but given the game's general pace, it's hardly the best solution. Additionally, there's no accurate way to judge whether or not a character can make the jump from one island to another, which forces players to make a leap of faith, hit charge attack a few times, and hope it's enough.

We have to emphasize the fact Plain Sight is a fun arcade action game, but the swinging camera made it almost impossible for us to play for long, especially on large maps with a lot of floating islands to jump onto. It's not that we didn't want to play more, we simply couldn't. Regrettably, even though Plain Sight has a lot going for it, we have to recommend waiting until some of these issues are properly addressed in future patches. But if you happen to have a superior tolerance for fast rotating maps, then this is a game worth picking up.